skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I see. So if I may paraphrase, TSX can also help write work-loads by eliminating locks that weren't actually needed because no actual contention over the same data occurred. This can happen if the lock was too coarse-grained and the writes were actually to different memory, or if the dynamically-executed path didn't actually mutate shared memory.

Yes, those two cases are what I'd consider secondary benefits, that could be achieved straightforwardly (but not easily, as you note) without TSX. The primary case -- when the lock is fine-grained, and thread A does mutate a value that thread B does eventually read, but B's read doesn't come until A is already out of the critical section -- is the big win for well-designed software, IMO.

> It's unclear to me whether recovering from mis-speculation is more expensive than acquiring the lock up-front. In other words, is there overhead in the case that you almost always encounter actual contention?

On big x86 cores, there shouldn't be much performance overhead. x86 already has mechanisms for holding tons of in-flight memory operations in the core without releasing and/or committing them to the rest of the memory system. TSX simply specifies a new reason for holding them ("we're in the middle of an SLE transaction"). If your transaction is aborted because another core touched the lock, you can flush that buffer of memory ops and rollback to a checkpointed register file almost instantly. The paper describes a hardware predictor that decides whether or not to initiate a transaction on a given store; in any smart implementation, this predictor would incorporate information like "have I incurred expensive rollbacks due to transaction aborts on this store?" In that way, a smart implementation should tune itself to yield arbitrarily low average- or worst-case overhead over the non-TSX case.

> It's also unclear to me how this can be done without instruction set support, as the paper claims. Without having the critical sections explicitly marked how can this be implemented?

(No pedantry intended, I'm sure you already read this) It's explained in Section 3.3. They look for this pattern:

Initially, MEM[x] = A
STORE MEM[x] = B
...
...
STORE MEM[x] = A (original value)

They consider anything between these "silent store pairs" to be a potential critical section, and the predictor can choose to try to elide the two stores and form a transaction, if it wishes. It is always OK to elide these two stores, whether it's a "real" critical section or not, as long as nobody tries to read MEM[x] in the middle (in the memory model they assume, anyway).

You definitely require ISA support if:

1) Your silent stores may have other side effects (I/O?)

2) You have synchronization primitives that don't fit the silent store pattern (ticket lock?)

3) You have a strong business interest in making the behavior of existing software, even at the microarchitectural level, as predictable as possible (Intel?)
My apologies. $10 per user/per month for Enterprise version. This is fixed.

Thank you for letting us know,

-V.
This is pretty cool. Given how many developers are somewhat unhappy with iCloud's reliability and what not it'll at least provide another choice. Might even spur Apple to try and make it work better than it currently does.
There are people saying this (more or less): leaders can be used in a any field, even a field they don't know.

Being a technical person, I used to doubt this too. But having seen to many bad managers in such a short time, I believe it's true. When you are senior enough, in a small company, you don't need a technical supervisor. You just need someone you can trust, who gives you political backup and who will evaluate you on your results.
Anyone else expect the article to be one sentence long: "by hiring 5 female engineers!"
Changing How I Think About Finance
Open source html5 roguelike 'Wayward' goes beta
http://www.popehat.com/2013/02/06/the-popehat-signal-help-an...
GNU and the FSF should be split up
Put it this way:

* hiring any software developer right now is seemingly an uphill task, driving up salaries.

* If women are discriminated against in IT (and lets face it ...) then there is a huge pool of under-tapped engineers out there - whilst many are not in software right now, there is an equal number of talented, driven, intelligent women who could enter the profession.

* If only we could learn from the experiences of people like etsy we could double the pool of software talent.

* If we can double the pool of available talent, hiring will become easier and salaries will plummet.

* ...

* Stuff that - lets keep being sexist, and bash etsy for trying.
IMVHO, it definitely is, but it's a good list of things to aspire to.
Wow, Porsche really came out on top, which I'm glad to see.
Banker Turned Monk Does an AMA
Legally, where does that leave StarCraft, especially the soon to be released Heart of the Swarm (all have units called Space Marines)?

If GW don't (and never did) enforce their trademark against Blizzard, do they have any say against a book author that wants to push the topic in front of a court?

AFAIK, Blizzard didn't license the term.
"Closed: Works for me"
AOL Shutting Down Hipster.com
Well, yes, but terms of art are generally reserved for discussions among specialists. If I started using words like 'class' or 'object', I can be reasonably expected to be talking about OOP. Unless, that is, I'm attending a conference on Marxism, in which case nobody will assume that; they'll assume that I'm talking about sociological class and objectification. If I talk about 'master-slave hierarchies' on HN, I'm probably talking about database replication. In a race studies class, I'm talking about something entirely different.

I don't think it's entirely reasonable to say that people are 'mis-using' a word by adopting its most popular usage in a discussion between non-specialists, and I think it's doubly unreasonable to complain about the confusion being caused when you try to use the specialist definition.

If you're as aware of social science as you sound, then you'll be well-aware of the power of words, and the power of defining what a word means. By seeking to define a word, and implying that those who don't accept your definition as ignorant ("people who've never been forced to confront their privilege") and by insisting that it is they who need to change their vocabulary and not you who need to be more precise, you're behaving quite arrogantly; in the manner, if I might mischievously suggest, of a person who believes in the privileged position of their knowledge on the subject and their right to tell others how to speak.
I disagree. Value isn't always driven just through single-user use cases. If you focused on making "Draw Something" with a strong single-user focus you'd have a dud. I would argue that to think of single-user first and then bolt on network effects is the exact problem with most growth-hack thinking. You can't just put lipstick on a pig and hope for virality. It has to be baked in from the beginning.

The goal of the infographic was to communicate the core elements of design that foster viral growth. Answering questions like "How does a user's experience get better the more people they're connected to on the service?" is key to designing the UX in a way that benefits the user and drives growth.
Elon Musk: His Story in His Own Words (Video)
They are not required to sue every person to defend their trade mark. They could simply ask Hogarth to enter a license agreement.
I imagine that, being steeped in the tech industry, you pay much more to our conversations than those of other industries. I would be hard-pressed to believe that other male-dominated or gender-skewed don't also think about these sorts of issues. Perhaps they just have other forums (like, say, Forbes magazine [1] or academic/industry journals [2]) to discuss them.

1: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0316/072_terminated_women....
2: http://folk.uio.no/olegmo/Men%20in%20Nursing/Evans%20J%20199...
Damn that's a lot of knowledge on Oranges :-)
I'm observing the difference between one approach to RPGs and another. WoTC is the current maker of D&D. Granted, they're competing more against World of Warcraft than other pen & papers these days, but it's still very interesting to see how they've tried to change their model. GW still seems very reliant on pewter miniatures for survival, which will not last as something like this http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/formlabs/form-1-an-affor... gets down to the $500 + cost of resin price level.
VuongN, you are indeed correct that you cannot currently share data with the service. this will change in the near future.

i had a look at your site, nice design :)
Now I don't feel so left out :-) I memorized it when I was 13 because I saw it on the wall every day.
Thanks - removed the link.
> To make a long story short, all work done by NovaStudios was from overseas.

I'm curious how you know this.

Also, I've read your PDF file and I have to say that it doesn't reflect well on you or your company.

For example, Michael you say:

> HOW CAN THE DEVELOPER ABORT THE PROJECT, IF IT WAS ME WHO STARTED THE PROJECT AND WHO PAID FOR IT?????????

Freelance contracts are always optional for both parties---you can be fired, or you can quit. To complain so strenuously about someone quitting your project shows that you deeply misunderstand the nature of the contractor-contractee relationship.

You repeat this about 3 times in your conversation with freelancer.com support, so its not a one-off misunderstanding.

Also about the milestone system... The milestone system is supposed to protect you by having you only pay once a milestone has been completed. If you pay before the milestone is completed, you defuse the entire process. At that point, its too late to complain that Freelancer.com failed you. Ideally, if someone completes 2 of 3 milestones and then bombs out, you have 2/3rd of the work done and can hand the 1/3rd of the project to someone new.

At this point, I question the accuracy of your narration because you did pay out most of the money to them.
Why the Red Delicious No Longer Is (2005)
What startups are looking for in student hires
This Moth-Driven Robot Is a Step Towards Automatons That Mimic Life
Spam Is Forever: Why We're Still Getting It (150 Years Later)
I'm sorry, this is ridiculous. So if a Japanese person discriminates against me on the basis of race in Japan, it is racist, but do it in the US and it is "racial discrimination"?
In our Play app, we isolate the real tricky stuff from our controllers and then write unit tests for it there. The controllers themselves end up being fairly lean and simple, so we test them (along with the front-end) with Selenium. We're not dogmatic about 100% coverage as we are a start-up trying to move fast, but this approach has worked well for us.
Also add --env-shebang so that you don't get stupid shebang lines which lock you to a specific interpreter.
I find it pretty easy to test static methods. To me, testing a ton of static methods would seem a bit easier than testing a ton of classes, since static methods are usually stateless and so require less setup/cleanup work.

Could you explain a bit more about what makes static methods harder?
"Unsupported gender stereotypes." Stated also as "opinions based on experience."

Oh yeah, but you see here these "opinions based on experience" would be "personal prejudices formed by filtering the world using your existing beliefs" whereas "unsupported gender stereotypes" would mean unsupported by rigorous studies.
Thanks, those are gorgeous one-offs!
Yes, good eye. That is precisely what the parent poster was telling us.

Instead of responding to what they said, you simply made fun of an argument that they weren't making.
Another Trello user here. We use it in-house, but also my wife and I use a separate board for things we want to pass along to each other. Works great.
"Due to a built in taste moderation, it is hard to hit your natural upper limit. But because energy drinks are sweet and easily drinkable, novice caffeine users can hit their upper limit in a short amount of time."

It's an interesting hypothesis. I'd add that coffee is (most often) served hot, and as such, consuming a cup of coffee takes quite a bit longer than chugging down a cold can of Red Bull.

And about that chugging: it's a different use case. People are conditioned to treat energy drinks like stimulants. The drinks are even marketed as such. Coffee, on the other hand, is primarily consumed in moderation (aside from classic tales of all-nighters, etc., which probably represent a fraction of a percentage of coffee usage). People see coffee as a morning ritual, whereas they see energy drinks as -- for lack of a better word -- speed. The use cases are very different, as are the consumption patterns.

I would hypothesize that energy drinks are inherently no more dangerous than coffee, at least as far as their ingredients go. Rather, they're more dangerous because they're consumed in greater quantities and at greater speed -- rapidly injecting the body with massive quantities of caffeine, and thus shocking the unprepared system. Coffee is more of a slow drip of caffeine, as it were.
When they're trying to explain how they were able to increase women hires, it's useful to get actual information rather than what seems like filler.
Federal Reserve Admits To Getting Hacked; Anonymous Claims Responsibility
That was a very responsible thing to do. :)
+9000 Cause upvoting this comment just isn't enough.
That's the only way to go about it, IMO.

It seems that in today's world, too many companies get a hair-brained idea from some executive that thinks they've got it all figured out, spend 100's of thousands building it, and millions to market it... only to discover that nobody actually likes it and/or will ever use it.

I don't want to name names (as I'm not looking to start a flamewar), but off the top-of-my-head I can think of several very prominent, very successful (historically) corporations that seem to use such a marketing-driven approach: instead of letting users fall in love with the product by their own devices, instead the corp tries to make the product and only then do they try to sell the user on why they should love it.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but when it doesn't it can be a costly mistake. When you have a compelling product or service, marketing is minimal; word-of-mouth is king!

Cheers, your service looks very cool.
RobotsLab Wants to Put a Box of Robots in Every Classroom
Dear Colleague,

Put the laptop/smartphone down. I'd rather you paid attention to the meeting instead of checking email/evernote/facebook. Even if you had the best intentions of taking notes for this meeting, I know how insidious notifications and instant updates can be. If you need to record a few items from this meeting you could jot a few notes down on a paper notebook. If I need to communicate something that is not easy to write down, like a long URL, I will make sure to email it to the meeting invite list, or even add it to the meeting description in our calendar.

And don't worry. I am not so self-important to assume that every nugget of information that I relate in this meeting needs to be captured immediately in some electronic vault of knowledge.
The problem is that "command experience" doesn't mean that you did a good job at it. The impression I've got from friends who have observed this process first hand is that people get shuttled into a job to get "command experience", do a crappy job but everyone hunkers down and waits because they know they'll be gone to a better gig in 6 months so why rock the boat, and then the person gets promoted with their newfound "command experience".
I don't agree. Freelancers who work online are used to having their name out there. It's part and parcel of the reputation systems built by Freelancer.com, Guru, and E-lance. Once work is completed, you get a public review.

To me, his main legitimate complaint is that Freelancer.com didn't allow him to leave a review, so he has to turn to taking his story to the wider public.

I don't really agree with his story, but he does have a write to name whom he has worked with in the past.
Thank you for the nice complement. We're continuing to improve and iterate it. We're just focusing on producing the best software at the moment so our public-facing site can take a little bit to perfect. We welcome any suggestions you may have.

We understand that trust is an important issue and we're definitely in the business to solve this very problem. Our team members are probably the most paranoid bunch you'll ever meet. We worry about our own privacy in the cloud so we set out to build something we can use. All of us now religiously use nCryptedCloud to secure our own sensitive data in Dropbox.

At the moment, nCryptedCloud works with Dropbox but our plan is to work with other cloud storage providers as well. Which cloud storage provider do you use?

-V.
Hi mijustin, founder here.

LeanSentry is somewhat similar to New Relic in that we provide server and application performance monitoring.

However, we are 100% focused on the Windows Server/IIS/ASP.NET stack (that's our background), and as a result provide deeper analysis and diagnostics for those applications.

Best,
Mike
>> The key to hiring females: Have a product that appeals to females.

If that was the key then Etsy would have already had many female engineers, their product hasn't changed.
Lend your computer's spare CPU time to scientific research
> "I said I don't see other male dominated industries complaining of lack of diversity."

Then you're just not reading those news sources. Here's one from yesterday: http://www.guardian.co.uk/healthcare-network/2013/feb/05/rac...

"The NHS thrives on equality and diversity. In some specialties, such as general practice, we know that almost a third of the emerging workforce are overseas-qualified. Without these immigrant workers the NHS would come to a standstill.

Despite this, many international medical graduates (IMGs) who have been the workhorses of the NHS, are over-represented in the lowest paid, least glamorous specialties in the least popular parts of the country. Some of them have faced racism, less recognition for awards and slow promotion in their working life."
"IPMI operates independently of the OS and allows administrators to manage a system remotely even without an OS, system management software, and even if the monitored system is powered off (along as it is connected to a power source). IPMI can also function after an OS has started, offering enhanced features when used with system management software."

Yikes! Sounds like system management mode in a BIOS!
Considering they labelled themselves as "The Lot18 for spirits" that kind of says they were aware IMHO. Either way - it's not the first time the Lot18 design has been completely copied by other companies in the same sector - though I believe this is the first U.S./New York one.

* Disclaimer - currently work for Lot18.
Not sure how this would work, but if I want notifications from everywhere, this would need to include IRC chat when people ping me with my name.
I don't accept redefinitions of words that pack in political assumptions. Lots of people use "socialist" to mean "anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan" but we have no problem dismissing that as biased hyperbole.

What you're essentially doing is trying to pack into the word "sexism" the notion that everything in society is systemically biased in favor of men, at the expense of women. But rather than establishing and defending that notion, you pack it in as an unquestioned assumption so that you don't have to defend it explicitly.

As a result, you deliberately minimize any injustices suffered by men to the benefit of women, implicitly saying that it doesn't matter as much when a man faces sexual discrimination. Again, you could simply argue this point explicitly, but for some reason you're trying to pack it into your language.

Steve Klabnik's point, stated explicitly, would be something like this: "that instance of sexual discrimination against men, in favor of women, doesn't really count for much, because on aggregate, society still discriminates against women in favor of men." As far as I can tell that's what he meant, and it's even a defensible argument from a feminist perspective, but it also lays bare a lot of assumptions that not everyone might agree with, so it's couched in the superficial form of a semantic argument. This not only makes the controversial premises of the argument easier to swallow, but renders them in a form of a simple factual claim giving the illusion of certitude.

As far as the scope of this discussion is concerned, I don't have a problem with Mr. Klabnik's point, but simply the dishonest way he expresses it.
It's also QNX based, so should be pretty rock solid, being a microkernel based RTOS with a small memory footprint. Also (interestingly), its network stack is based on NetBSD code.
"Coke" has other meanings in a different industry. "Space Marine" has prior art in the same industry.
Canadian penny’s days are numbered — but there are still 30B of them
Well, it's very weird if you understand anything about Network protocols. It's a layer of complexity that shouldn't be being touched by your NIC, so there shouldn't be a bug there because there shouldn't be code there.
Well then maybe sharecropping is a better analogy. Similar lack of agency but in theory you could leave.
But can the Coca Cola Company enforce its "Coke" trade mark against purveyors of fossil fuel derived coke products? It's silly to think that Coca Cola would try; and nothing at all like GW trying to bogart parts of the common sci-fi vernacular.
Bigoted, hateful feminists like you are exactly why the "feminists hate men" meme continues to gain steam.

Feminists claim that feminism is about furthering the rights and living conditions of all people, be they men, women, or something else.

Yet any time that someone dares to even mention the overreaching, harmful, unintended side effects of the policies feminist crusaders like you support, you literally respond with, "WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ".

We're not going to lick your boots, rmc. Get over yourself.
Considering they labelled themselves as "The Lot18 for spirits" that kind of says they were aware IMHO. Either way - it's not the first time the Lot18 design has been completely copied by other companies in the same sector - though I believe this is the first U.S./New York one.

* Disclaimer - I currently work for Lot18.
Gates Foundation-backed InBloom frees up data to personalize k-12 education
The beauty of HN is that this is pretty much the only place where you can meet the person with exactly the same exotic nerdy problem. I am thinking about moving from TiddlyWiki on Dropbox to Simplenote that (IIRC, at least when you pay) can synchronize notes to Dropbox, has a native iPhone app and a whole roster of 3rd party clients for other mobile OSs and desktop clients (http://simplenote.com/downloads/).
OS X - Adjust the volume in 1/4 increments
F# Promises a Big Return on Data
It's worse than that. It's not BIOS-- it's a freestanding computer.

You'll enjoy this (or be horrified by it): http://fish2.com/ipmi/itrain.html
How Music-Encoding Service Murfie Skirts Legal Muddles
My experience with open source projects is that bug reports are only taken seriously from people who are involved in the project. That means either you have contributed code, or you are a serious user who has spent time introducing yourself in the 'real' forum the developers use (typically freenode/IRC back in the day). Otherwise, the signal/noise ratio is just way too low for it to be useful to read through all the reports, particularly if the project is to any degree high profile.

The assumption is that a 'real' bug will eventually be reported by a 'serious' user or developer. Maybe that's wrong but that is how it works in the real world.