skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
x264 actually turns off vectorization in the configure script, because it's caused crashes and bugs in the past on various platforms. But even if you enable it, it usually almost never triggers. Even the Intel compiler's autovectorization only triggers in a few functions, despite its reputation, and typically does an pretty mediocre job.

The problem has many parts:

1. Autovectorization in general is just extremely difficult and even trivial code segments often get compiled very badly. It feels like the compiler is trying to fit the code into a few autovectorization special cases -- for example, a 16x16->16 multiply gets compiled into a 16x16->32 multiply, and then it laboriously extracts the 16 bits, probably because nobody wrote code to explicitly handle the former variant. A good autovectorizer would have to have a vast array of these sort of things to "know what to do" in a particular case, I'd imagine.

A lot of autovectorization resources seem to be tuned towards floating point math (which typically doesn't need the same sort of tricks), which probably exacerbates the problem in x264's case.

2. The compiler doesn't know enough. It can't guarantee alignment, it doesn't know about the possible ranges of the input values or the relationship among them, it doesn't know the things the programmer knows.

3. SIMD algorithms are often wildly different from the original C. Much of the process of writing assembly is figuring out how to restructure, reorder, and transform algorithms to be more suitable for SIMD. The compiler can't really realistically do this; its job is to translate your C operations into machine operations, not rewrite your algorithm.

Part of this problem is that C is just not a great vector math language, but part of it is also that the optimal algorithm structure will depend on the capabilities of your SIMD instructions and their performance. For example, when the pmaddubsw instruction is available, it's faster to do x264's SATD using a horizontal transform first, but if not, it's faster to do it with a vertical transform first. The Atom CPU has pmaddubsw, but only has a 64-bit multiplier, making it too slow to utilize the horizontal version (so it gets the vertical version instead).

You can definitely finagle code into getting hit by the autovectorizer, especially with Intel's compiler, but it takes a lot of futzing to make it happy, and even when it is happy, it can be many times slower than proper assembly. Of course, it's not useless -- it can get you some relatively free performance improvements without writing actual SIMD code. But it's not a replacement.
The First Federated Indieweb Comment Thread
“I currently read 10-15 news sites. I spend too much time reading the news. How do I get to the stories that really matter to me?”

I don’t know about you, but for me, this problem is solved by using RSS (Reeder) and receiving email digests from Percolate, The Brief, and Hackernewsletter.

http://www.percolate.com

http://www.thebrief.io

http://www.hackernewsletter.com

Bonus: http://www.thefeature.net/
From what I can gather, Cuil was a sort of search engine that created summaries of pages using some algorithm. This algorithm often spliced together strange sentences without context. If you look at the whole thread, it seems that the person before the linked comment makes an analogy between Reddit's algorithm to determine thumbnails for a given link, and Cuil's algorithm to generate summaries.

Then, the user that was linked to, goes on to describe a technique to use the term "Cuil" as a unit of measurement, for how disjointed something is from something else.
Git: Resolving diabolical merges
Palantir at one point had a pay cap on base salary (I think they still do). Theoretically it's made up by equity.
It is always a matter of investment.

If Sun did not invest in JIT research Java would already be gone, the same for JavaScript JIT research.

Having used those systems I can say they were fast enough to be able to display videos. The codecs make use of Assembly, but the same is true when C is used.

Those languages were just victims of the C trap, were the OS copied the UNIX model and thus were being developed in C as well.

Which mainstream OS vendor can you imagine bringing an OS to the market, with an alternative systems programming language and being able to succeed at it?
Hah! Quake 3 and UT99 both were helped immensely by having the ability to command bots--that often would be the difference between a stalemate in a CTF map and a flawless victory.
I worked at a startup in NYC that had a $200K pay cap. It applied to everyone, including executives. However, I believe they abandoned the policy because it made it too hard to hire.
I had the same concern, but after having a mini for a while, I can tell you that I don't notice the lack of retina resolution at all. They hold their value really well too - I highly recommend just getting one now and selling it once retina comes out.
IPhone Super-Hacker Let Go From Apple, Goes To Work For Google
"So i'm still an apache httpd guy , can you sell me nginx in 3 simple points ?" (actually i'm using it already , i need to sell it to my boss).
Let's see how long this stays on the front page. HN does not like conservative politicians.
You make good points.

It is tricky to know whether an NGO or charity is honest and effective.

I'd be interested to hear how your startup goes. Please feel free to email me anytime.
Good luck to all the participants :)
Might be a good one, say you are on vacation, and would like to be able to relive the experience at a later point.
I'll see what I can do about that.
I think you can definitely raise $50,000 via $5-$20 lottery tickets. Of course the legality of it may make it trickier.
They also account for an infinitesimally small amount of global net traffic. Their rapid adoption of IPv6 is more symbolic than anything else. And it got them mentioned here, so presumably it was a success.
...without the same legal recourse as you would a real financial institution.
Seeing this as your view, i think it is a fair assessment.

But there are some things that make me think a bit more:

[0]"They also have to care"
[1]"sociopaths are characterized by a lack of empathy and remorse"

To establish one's caring ability [0], does one have to explicitly state that they care (to the public), or can that be a judgement coming from the massess from "whatever" basis makes up the moral code of their society that had been established by a relative minority group of people over time (which sometimes constitutes the tyranny of the majority)?

And again with [1], is this a self characterization, or an external one?

From the examples above by you before, it seems like sociopaths are more than likely in a position of power that was given by a group of people. If so, what does that say about the group of people (or massess) that empower the sociopaths?
Add Market Value to Your Home With Vinyl Siding Replacement
Pfft. If he understood what he was doing, I hate him more. So far I've always given him the benefit of the doubt when considering the results of his actions on 9/11, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, with the banking crisis, with Katrina, with secrecy, with making torture American policy, with No Child Left Behind, with the Patriot Act, and with turning a surplus into the worst recession in decades.

I'd hate to see what a mess a real genius would have made with all that.

All this story shows me is a man preternaturally gifted in terms of understanding the people around him, and bullshitting.
Why city-wide surveillance failed to stop the Boston bombings
If you want to donate to a good cause, go donate to a good cause, you don't need Tim Cook for that.
Useful tips about SEARCHQUERIES in Nokia s60MOBILE XPLORERApplication
Scaling to 1M  Users - Customer Acquisition Strategies
I seem to recall him getting bad grades in school too, right. I'm not totally convinced by this article. In any case, does it really matter how smart the guy was when he made so many really bad decisions on important issues like attacking countries for no reason?
Might be more difficult with someone with more limited appeal (to the mainstream) like Tim Cook, but I do believe they've raised considerably more than that with their other auctions.

To be clear, I don't actually know how much they've raised, which I think is a failure of the site so far; giving to charity should be transparent.
Techstars Cloud 2013 Demo Day – back to San Antonio we go
It shouldn't be a surprise that GW Bush is smarter than his public image. By the end of his second term, his public image was that he is a complete moron. So the bar is set pretty low.

But the speeches and stumbles are only part of the reason for his poor public image. More significant is that his policies and decisions were catastrophically disastrous. We're still recovering from the mess that he made.
Have any payment processors announced plans to get into this? I'm already talking to a payment processor to charge credit cards, so if they added a tax calculation API it would almost certainly be easier for me to integrate that into my systems than it would be to deal with some totally separate tax calculation service.
Collaboration tools for remote teams
This is the "Contributors" feature, which has been tested internally and with a few partners, but has never been widely enabled. It's in the public API, but still disabled for all but internal accounts and those few partners.
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1/get/users/contributors

I don't have any current insight into the status of Contributors, and won't speculate, but the feature has been stagnant for almost 3 years now (just like Lists).
You should check out his autobiographical book Decision Points, wherein he apologizes for a lot of that crap.
I cannot find that video/text from Chomsky where he says the same thing about G. W. Bush and that every politician has a persona.
My first reaction -- I feel like this critic is engaged in a Sisyphean task, where she'll never actually roll the rock over the mountain, but she wants credit because her rock is bigger than yours.

But, maybe you can learn something from her by listening carefully. Is it really just prejudice, or is there some experience to back it up?
I flag this article because it's anecdote about a politician. His party is irrelevant to my decision to flag.

There's probably not much meaningful discussion that will happen from this article. Maybe something that could happen is "Why do politicians have to act dumb?" - there are examples of well educated 'posh' English MPs faking a less posh accent; there are examples of US polls asking who you'd like to have a beer with.

Democracy really sucks in England, and from what I can tell it sucks even more in the US.

Obviously it's better than any alternative, but the versions we have are broken in ways that are hard to fix and which give us really bad, weird, outcomes.
Yes, Palantir will be 10 years old next year, has already taken Series G funding:

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/palantir-technologies

and the salary cap is $127k:

http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/killer-app/
I've never seen water simulation with this degree of complexity in games. I've seen it in prerendered video sequences, but when you sit and look at a lake or river in an Elder Scrolls game (or similar), it is usually much more simplified -- or has a flow which is modeled to look pretty.

The difference here is that it's showing interaction between the water particles and things that they impact on: characters, boundaries, piers, and behave in a more realistic way than games have previously had.
Why should we expect the president to understand better than the economists?
If the author wants us to discuss the point he should get to it faster rather than droning on about apple stock and product pipelines.

300 words isn't so much that it's cumbersome to read, but it definitely primed me to think that his point was somehow specific to apple and investing when it wasn't at all. I'm not surprised that people have decided to nitpick it.
It depends on if regex performance is a bottleneck in your app. I typically use the standard regexp package unless I noticed its a problem (which isn't often), then I switch to a package with the same API that uses PCRE [1].

1: https://github.com/glenn-brown/golang-pkg-pcre
don't you mean that his policies and decisions were inadequate to fix the issues caused by his predecessor? <putsonflameretardantcoat>
Startups shouldn't have to pay a VC's legal bills, says Bijan Sabet
He got a 1200 on the SAT back when it was 1600 scale, and was a C average student at Yale. He released his own report card:
http://2004.georgewbush.org/bios/yale-transcript.asp

Test scores and grades aren't everything, but it's hard to believe he's smarter than the current crop of Stanford MBAs. Top schools today are more competitive than they have ever been. He wouldn't have been considered for the schools he attended with those marks today.
> a single “big memory” (192 GB) server we are using has the performance capability of approximately 14 standard (12 GB) servers.

That's 168 GB RAM total, within a single upgrade unit of their 192 GB single server, suggesting the problem is dominated by RAM.

If I had $6638 + 2640 = $9278 to spend on computing hardware from NewEgg, how about:

1 at $1000 of HP ProLiant DL360e Gen8 Rack Server System Intel Xeon E5-2403 1.8GHz 4C/4T 4GB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859107943 http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06a/15351-15351-3328412-241644-241475-5249570.html?dnr=1 (12 DIMM slots)
4 at $70 of Kingston 8GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Registered DDR3 1333 Server Memory Model KVR13LR9S4/8 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820239540
1 at $54 of Seagate Barracuda ST250DM000 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148765
$1334 ea server, 7 servers = $9338

So we could get 7 of these low-end name-brand 16 GB servers for the same money to give us 224 GB RAM.

> MR++ runs on 27 servers whereas the standalone conﬁgurations are a single server running a single-threaded implementation

Sure, nothing will beat a single system at message-passing algorithms when the entire graph fits in main memory. But when the dataset outgrows that (and it will), we can triple the RAM in the empty slots, or add more servers in units of $1334 instead of having to rewrite your whole analysis.
I think a lot of this confusion comes from what appears to be a mismatch between how he was when he was up and coming, vs. how he was in his later time as president.

If you watch his older speeches and ad-hoc interactions, he was extremely sharp. And if you watch him later he seemed easily confused and steeped in dogma.

I almost feel like he was poisoned, or beaten down, by the pressure of the presidency and the various narratives from Rove, Cheney, etc.

Either way, there's likely truth to both accounts--that he is both much brighter than people think he is, and that he often acted like a complete idiot.
May I ask how you know that Tim Cook, Jony Ive, or any other Apple exec isn't "shaking up the can"?

As a matter of fact their CEO fired the one guy who wasn't willing to shake things up. In fact, I think he was fired for that very reason.
Startup Mistakes: Building Everything Yourself
“For [$30 million], you could hire 60 people to work for $50,000/yr for one year.”

$30 million / $50,000 = 600

You wouldn’t be able to hire 600 people, but you’d definitely get more than 60 English majors. Even after taxes, insurance, benefits, HR, management, accounting, rent, equipment, travel expenses, etc, you could probably afford at least 200 English majors at $50,000 a year.
The author said he was smarter than most of his Stanford Business School students, not just the general population.
Is the actual data available for download yet? I'm just seeing hundreds of meta-data XML files.
Great! You are prolific! A language, a web framework, sites built upon that framework, and all of the documentation. You sure you're just one person?
> No one was lynched by redditors (or in danger of being lynched)

Anyone who thinks that Salah Barhoun's life wasn't in danger for a few hours there just hasn't thought things through. This country is littered with small people with guns who would love to assassinate the newest boogeyman.
> However my original statement defined systems as kernel code, since HN tends to have many opinions on the topic.

That is how I understood it. Have a look at the Project Oberon book.

Assembly is only used for the boot loader, device driver glue and some GC implementations. The same type of stuff you need language extensions in C as well, as they are not part of ANSI C.

Everything was coded in Oberon or Active Oberon, depending on which OS version we talk about.

This startup is selling embedded compilers for Oberon that target 32 bit ARM since the late 90's.

http://www.oberonday2011.ethz.ch/talks/armembedded.pdf

The trick is to have control when the GC happens and to allow for manual memory management via a SYSTEM pseudo module.

But yes, in the current state of affairs C and C++ will outlive us anyway.
do you plan on making this an app?
Hi,

I'm the user who contributed symfony 2 to the benchmark. My intention was to get as much php frameworks in the next round as possible (Symfony 2, Codeigniter, Laravel etc.), so I didn't pay much attention on the possible optimisations of the frameworks. On top of that I'm not a php guy, so it's possible that every php framework I contributed to the benchmark runs on breaks. ;o)

In Symfony's case I posted on the mailing list in order to get users with symfony experience to improve the performance, but this post was sadly not activated/moderated.
I don't have both my laptop and desktop on at the same time most of the time. Therefore syncing between them would happen very intermittently if there wasn't a cloud in the middle.

Additionally, I wouldn't be able to get access to my files when I was at my parents without my laptop - which I can do with Dropbox.
What they're saying is that this is an important advantage that BT Sync lacks.
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias" is a quote from Stephen Colbert, when he was in-character as a right-wing pundit for a comedy show. Reality, by definition, has no bias.
let me ask a rhetorical question: suppose you were the head of a large multinational corporation. Every day you have meetings where you have to make decisions that may irrevocably alter the course of the company. You depend on a small group of people to filter up to you all pertinent information needed to make the decisions accurately. How well do you think that would work? I say that no one can do very well in that instance, all the leader can do is set the tone, and hope that his people will implement the spirit of his intentions.
"The real mistake was not understanding our business. Our business was the app, not the technology."
People often associate Presidents' public images with how intelligent they are. People look at the videos of Bush making speech gaffes and assume he is a moron because he occasionally uses pseudo-english. What is weird about the presidential office is that we never actually see any of our presidents doing their job. We only see their image and how they communicate with the public.
What happens if you run Hadoop on that single machine?
Thank you! It's so obvious but I missed that. Also this term implies marriage (to me at least). #sigh

It's amazing how hard this is.
Is even CC now unacceptable among the free culture fundamentalists?
> The unfortunate thing is that there is no popular open source implementation of a multicore mapreduce

Not popular, I'd agree, but I have had a lot of success with one-off Akka projects. My mappers and reducers are usually under 10 lines of Scala (more if I'm stuck writing Java, obviously).
I read an analysis somewhere that claimed this degeneration was a symptom of alcohol and drug use in his early years. However, that analysis was on a partisan website, and I took it with a big grain of salt.

The main thing that struck me about the analysis was that it showed some of his earlier speeches, which I had never seen before, and he did indeed come across like a completely different person.
Future of the Exit, Post CrowdFunding
How I did it :

- started in a particular industry

- Kept working in same industry and built "domain expertise". Need min 5+, ideally 8+ years of "actual" experience.

- Changed jobs 3-4 times within the first 5 years. But remained in the same industry. Built a lot of networks/contacts on the way. (Job hopping is not necessarily a bad thing in today's world if you know how to do it properly). Every hop, negotiated a good raise (15-20% in US is good raise). I always sold myself using the "value" that I was already bringing to the table because I was in the same domain doing specific thing that the next employer really needed.

- Finally after 5 years of solid experience, decided it was time to go consulting on my own. Started talking to all my contacts in the industry where I was already known/valuable and started somewhere. Charge flat Daily rate and take care of your own expenses.

- Raise your rates at the end of every engagement. But try and get long term engagements as well. Personally, i work on 18+ months contracts (the nature of my industry and projects). So by the time you are done 1st time, client usually wants you bad enough to give you a decent raise. Won't always work however.

- Never settle for less if you know your worth. So first figure out what you are worth to a prospective employer whom you are interested in or who is interested in you. Always fight for the extra few grand. Why ? Because the next time you are negotiating with the next guy, those few grands will make a difference on what number you are asking for next. People always look at what you are making currently unless you are an expert in your field or were currently underpaid for whatever reason etc.
Because you have to write multiple-value-bind yourself, no &optional and &key parameters, no try/catch or condition system and verious other reasons.

Scheme is case sensitive by default though, which I like.

It's sort of like asking 'Why C++ and not C?'. It's the features or lack thereof that you have to want or not want that lead you to your initial decision.

Then you switch to the other to see what you're missing.

Then you make up your mind.
No, you have to ask an interesting question or propose an interesting scenario for people to want to comment.
On Ubuntu, there is an "nginx-extras" package with more modules. I don't have a centos machine handy.

But really, the burden of a 'custom compile' is small. Nginx configuration is simple, it has minimal dependencies, and it builds quickly. You will need zlib-dev and openssl-dev.
You can't compare old pricing against new. Now you can get 384 GB for under $9K and 768 GB would be maybe $15K.
Politics aside, this is a good reminder on the importance of when confronted with an opposing viewpoint to consider "Why would a smart person think that?". They may in point of fact not be smart but it's too easy to use that as an excuse to stop thinking. Ever notice how hard it is to hear someone you respect say something you disagree with?
Excellent advice as always. One question: When talking about marketing for internet businesses, I don't remember you mentioning branding much, if at all, mostly direct response marketing stuff. Is this by choice? Have you got an opinion about branding for internet startups - eg how many resources they should devote to it compared to direct response marketing?
I would like to add that you need also be the type of individual that isn't afraid to ask for what you're worth in the market. Employers will gladly pay you less if you're willing to take it.
Explain? Is this some offshoot from the original Creative Commons licenses that Aaron co-invented?
The only argument is about some of the "non-free" variants: NonCommercial and NonDerivatives. http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/35773
Zakynthos