skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with FPGAs is that they are a niche technology that is unable to exit its niche.

As someone who used FPGAs in a hardware design and regretted it later: there are two major problems with using an FPGA:

* it is too expensive for cost-sensitive devices,

* moving data onto and out of the chip is and always will be a problem.

Now, as to #1 above, you will hear FPGA enthusiast say that prices are just about to fall as more and more devices are produced. But I've heard such claims since at least 1998 and so far this simply hasn't happened.

As to #2, the number of MAC operations is irrelevant if you can't supply the chip with data. This is something even modern GPUs have trouble with, in spite of the monstrous bandwidth of the PCI slots they are placed in. Most algorithms will need to move data in and out, and use intermediate storage. Once you do all that, you end up with an expensive and complex design, that doesn't perform all that well anymore, and that is a pain to program and debug.

Also, if what you're doing is high-performance computing, then you have to compare the expenses with just getting a larger AWS instance or a cluster.

As a result, I tend to advise younger programmers to learn about FPGAs, but not become obsessed with them, as they are very rarely the right tool for the job. I'd even say they are almost never the right tool, except in very rare circumstances.
I think it makes more sense to say the author is writing it like that to show that Obama was stumbling with his words in response to a "yes/no/I don't know" question. That's useful information that I appreciate the author conveying.
You might want to consider why your nation is considered a US ally. Because it sure isn't just because the US takes their word for it.

Intelligence agencies promote international stability, because they mean that at the high-level strata of world organization, its still possible to have a very informed opinion of the disposition, intentions and important issues of one's neighbours. A world where we don't know these things is less stable - you can't have trade negotiations publicly if you don't have a good idea of what can and can't be asked for, you can't "trust" anyone unless you can be reasonably sure they're not planning to stab you in the back or funding insurgencies, or if they're dealing with significant internal power struggles.

And frankly, the US doesn't know you. It also doesn't care about you. It's not a person, its a massive nation of millions, much like your own is. The fact you're allies at a high-level means precisely zilch for what your personal intentions are towards the US.
Why Google's Design Is More Consistent Than Apple's Unorganized iPhone Mess
>But high level corporate or government lawyers rarely sign their names to anything that isn't legally rock solid.

So magically, these "high level" people stop trying to overreach? Suddenly they're struck with a respect for privacy and law? That's simply not credible. Feds regularly abuse seizure laws[1], why would you possibly think they're more restrained elsewhere?

I'd expect a reasonably high acceptance rate, especially if they're allowed to pick judges sympathetic to them. But a rate approaching zero should set off red flags.

1: e.g. http://www.wbur.org/2013/01/24/tewksbury-motel-foreclosure
Traditional VC investment vs. Bitcoin IPO crowdfunding
Couldn't it just be laziness? Is it customary to clean up someones speeched transcript so that it reads better in written form?
Yes, you can imagine a different existence, but life is what it is. You might imagine a different existence, but that doesn't change the facts, or the hand we're dealt.

I actually worry about abolishing death, because then what are we? What would define the human existence? Would love be the same, without the fear of loss?

You said it quite well in your last paragraph actually. :)
This is basically what happened in the diplomacy world when the State Department cables were leaked.
Similar to the NAND to Tetris article posted earlier, when I went through college, we built a microcontroller using Altera EPROMS. I had been programming for years prior, and understanding how the ALU could be performing many simultaneous calculations only switching the output based on the opcode, completely changed my perspective.
The newer FPGAs sound pretty nice and significantly more capable than what I've worked with. Definitely something I'll keep in mind.
Yea, it does sidetrack from the substance of the discussion.
Most humans don't know the answer to this question all of the time.
I guess it is no longer relevant.
> And what that does is that does not apply to any U.S. person. Has to be a foreign entity.

Referring to a living, breathing human being with feelings, emotions, needs and wants (just like any American) as an "entity" is what Rory Miller calls "othering" [1]. The point of othering is to remove the humanity from someone or from a group of people. It makes it easier for someone to monitor, torture and... kill someone else.

And Americans are masters at it. People in the middle east, regardless of anything, are referred to by Americans as hajis. Gooks in Vietnam. And so on. It's subtle, but it works on Joe Public as well as it does on American soldiers invading some random country.

It's inhumane.

[1] Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected - http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594392137
Cheers. That one was 'By Nicholas Shaxson Published 24 February 2011', conclusion:

UK Uncut, the spontaneous protest movement opposing offshore tax avoidance by multinationals, has had an impact and now pledges to move against the banks. A big "One London" campaign to merge a divided capital into a single democratic entity may seem far off, but groups such as London Citizens are now thinking about the fairer division of London. The Tax Justice Network, and others, are helping build an intellectual edifice for understanding tax havens. Some of their goals - such as country-by-country reporting by multinationals - are already being partly met. The unions, too, and big NGOs, especially those working in international development, are engaging with the matter. An anti-haven mobilisation is under way in France; something similar may be starting in the US. The IMF, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the EU and other agencies are now at least debating issues they ignored before. Around the world, legislators, regulators and ordinary people are starting to see the toxicity of Britain's role in protecting offshore business that drains billions out of developing countries each year.

I wonder if there's been any positive development.
> And they've shown zero interest in improving local education, either within the school system or independently.

Surely that'll change over time? If there's an influx of well-paid young people now, within 10 years you'll have a pulse of well-off freshly-minted parents working its way through the system, some of whom are going to be incensed enough to fix the problems they see. In theory that sort of improvement shouldn't have to be centrally directed.
Not that correlation implies causation, but as of yet, consciousness is only considered in creatures which also recognize morality.
OK. I know it's the usual fluff-quest, the usual navel-gazing. TechCrunch raised to the power of TechCrunch. Gotta write your 500 words. I get it. You wake up and think:

"Lots of people are discussing X, Y and Z and I can't think of anything to write today. I guess I'll write about how people are writing about X, Y and Z and slap a thick sauce of world-weary ennui on top to hide that the fish has turned."

But I must regretfully derail the entire conversation, because I am unable to let this one aside pass without comment:

> But they also let people numb emotional pain rather than face it, quiet their children rather than teach them.

Let's just leave the psychiatry to the psychiatrists, shall we? And admit to ourselves that perhaps watching Garden State isn't a substitute for earning a medical degree and a psychology degree and doing research and taking supervised placements.

Looking down on pharmaceutical treatments for depression and ADHD because it's fashionable to hate Big Pharma is more than annoying. It is harmful because it perpetuates inaccurate stereotypes about the treatability of difficult, potentially life-threatening illnesses.

Please, all holders of poetic license. Stop doing taking this rhetorical shortcut. You are hurting people.
My conspiracy theory is that the visual design work on the new iOS is a ruse.

They're going to completely revamp later on - and want to keep it private for a big reveal. But they need to get the new interaction design work and dev APIs into the world now.
President of the International Criminal Tribunal = US Puppet?
Most are happy to buy "Made in the USA." and bash economic immigrants. Just because they were born on the wrong side of the border. Not unique to the USA, though.
Typographer Erik Spiekermann on iOS 7 [German]
Good science requires being willing to falsify even your own theories.

That willingness to break what you have made, to take on an attacker's mindset and say "What can go wrong with this?"

That is exactly what coding attacks teaches.
That's nice.

But too many people can't tell the difference between supporting an idea and publishing a repeatable experiment to test a falsifiable hypothesis in a peer reviewed journal.
[CSS3] Featured Display Banner - Saher Team
Did he or she tell the salesman they liked to play games? Such as statement could swing a recommendation (especially if interpreted as "Call of Duty" rather than "Minesweeper").
And non American are cockroaches with which you can do anything you want ?
Legal conclusion = well, maybe. Any lawyers? Discuss.

"Yes, they could be seen as compromising, but I am not sure how relevant it is to view that he operates as a puppet

[...]

The documents contain absolutely no proof that Meron took instructions from the US and Israel. The scandal is not Meron. The scandal is that a Danish Judge at the Tribunal puts forward unfounded rumors. Harhoff ought to be recused from the trial chamber in the Sesejl case, he is prone to convict." - Kevin Jon Heller, Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School.

Information tried to get in touch with judge Meron for a comment, but he did not respond to emails.
Mono does indeed have an LLVM backend. I have no idea if it is upto date with Mono, or LLVM. I'd love to know why one choose a difference compiler / VM. A fair comparison.
So no turning cockroaches into cybernetic devices you can control with your iPhone then?
A friend suggested that once.

He unsuggested it after I walked through the umpteen problems involved in implementing this over hundreds of millions of accounts.
I complained to Airbnb once about a dirty and grimy bathtub. They said:

> As every property, guest and host is different and has different expectations and ideas of a level of acceptable cleanliness, it is very difficult to have a fully standardised workflow on cleanliness. What might be normal or acceptable to one person, may not be for another. Our hosting obligations specify these things, but obviously, what one person considers 'properly cleaned' is very different from another - you can read about the hosting obligations here - https://www.airbnb.com/policies#host_obligations

Airbnb is more work, more risk, more variability, and less certainty. If you’re staying at a hotel and something doesn’t work out, you can usually get another room or at least have it looked at. If the place you just booked on Airbnb does not work out, you’re out of luck.

Great customer support does not change the fact that it’s a necessity because incidents just happen. When you’re hit by a problem, you’re not a statistic.

I’ve got my fair shade of apparently unwashed linen, moldy-smelling crack shacks, pile of shoes randomly dumped in a coat closet, exposed wiring, blood stain in the bathtub, a random pot house hosting a skludgy Aussie drunkard, and a basement suite with a junked fridge outside of it. For the record, I’ve also got a fair amount of places with fabulous views, hosts who can’t be any nicer, and impeccably clean floors.

Booking with Airbnb is like gambling with your life quality in general. You have to be extremely cautious and meticulously expend a great amount of effort just to make sure you’re booking a place that’s actually good.

When it’s good it’s really good. When it’s bad it’s hellishly awful. Airbnb is sometimes much cheaper, but that’s possibly all it is to me.
While on the topic of Google, what do you think of Larry? Sergey? Eric?
Also South Africa, here its just up sell, up sell
That is of course a big philosophical question. But in lieu of diving into that, because Wikipedia says so:

Conscience is an aptitude, faculty, intuition or judgment of the intellect that distinguishes right from wrong. Moral judgment may derive from values or norms (principles and rules). In psychological terms conscience is often described as leading to feelings of remorse when a human commits actions that go against his/her moral values and to feelings of rectitude or integrity when actions conform to such norms.[1] The extent to which conscience informs moral judgment before an action and whether such moral judgments are or should be based in reason has occasioned debate through much of the history of Western philosophy.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscience
Not recognised as you say, except by the signatories of this on July 7th 2012.

http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConscious...
Subscription Payment Solutions for SaaS Startups based out of India
I would imagine that Apple like the headlines they get from runaway app successes like Angry Birds. Along with the subtle "Write apps for iOS and become the next Rovio!" message they send out. These massive hits are usually initially fueled by the "Top" lists so I don't see them being removed any time soon.
No, it is, but I am just wondering why it pops up here in a sudden while there's no specific news attached to it.
And thanks for it! It's blocking is great and the interface is by far the most userfriendly of the bunch :) I switched to it when it was mentioned on HN a few months ago.
Runtime debugging in Haskell is more rare, but when you need it, it's more of a headache.

Achieving performance is harder than in c or c++.

The ecosystem is strong on some counts and weak in others.

There's lots of API duplication (lazy/strict byte strings, map, set, seq, etc).

Good performance may depend on brittle ghc optimizations that might break in very difficult to comprehend ways if ghc is upgraded.
Middlemen, driving up costs for everyone for the last 2000 years.
Fuck the news, acquire knowledge. :D The reason it pops up is someone noticed it, posted it online, and it grew viral because it's something people like to hear.
The day we stop hurting other creatures is likely to be the day we stop hurting each other; wondering whether this day will ever come.
Wrong word. Consciousness, not conscience.
No, but spraying them with neurotoxins is fair game.
As a user-side filter, this is actually not that difficult to implement (assuming the device caches the list of purchased app ids for the current iTunes account, or even easier just the apps that are already installed on this device).

It means it'll take multiple requests to get all the results, sure, but if you weigh the initial request statistically (for the first 10, I think we'll need 12..) and so on, you can avoid even that.
Successful multinational corporations adapt their model to fit local cultures. The socialist culture in Scandanavia means people expect and reward businesses that offer free wifi; McDonald's/7-11 do it to remain competitive. I doubt it's the regulatory environment that makes the difference between Germany and Sweden - Sweden is also quite strongly regulated. And in other European countries where there is low regulation but an absence of socialist tradition (e.g. Italy) you don't see a whole lot of free wifi (or didn't when I was last there).
That's not an extreme case at all, I'd even argue RWS(T) (or its 'manual' version) is a very common stack.

As an example, I use RWST in Kontiki, my implementation of the Raft consensus protocol, where the R part contains configuration (e.g. the set of nodes in the cluster), the W part is filled with 'commands' to be executed after an FSM transition as a reaction on some event (incoming message, timeout,...), where 'commands' are things like 'send this message to node N', 'broadcast this message to all nodes', 'append this entry to the replicated log' or 'log this message (for debugging)', and finally the S part provides access to the current state.

Every FSM transition returns the new state, and a list of commands to execute (& the updated state of the S part, but that's discarded).

All you need to provide is an 'interpreter' for the commands.

This approach makes testing very easy: I can start at any desired state and event (that's just pure data), run the FSM on that (which is also a pure operation, although that's slightly complicated due to the MonadLog implementation which should underlie RWST, but that's besides this discussion), and check whether the output state & commands are the ones I expect, without mocking any networking or intercepting other IO.

[update]
As an example of what this looks like from inside the FSM code, see https://github.com/NicolasT/kontiki/blob/master/src/Network/... This is a rather straight-forward implementation of the algorithm and looks imperative, but is 100% pure (with all its benefits).
Being an American citizen how can i be sure i am not being spyed ..
Like this url has to say http://bit.ly/dt3ruz
AGain, why not mention its from 2012 in the title then? That's what people do on HN for older contents. and if you f* the news then why do you come on a website that has NEWS in its title?
A computer can easily know right from wrong to the degree most humans are capable of (and too often they aren't very sophisticated at that) even today. But it's safe to assume that that ARM processor has no conscious awareness. Conscious awareness is simply the feeling of observing things, a feeling we assume the machines we've built do not have, for example.
It will not. "Hurting" is such a meaningless word nowadays.
re: Perl - You're probably thinking of $_, which most Perl programmers call it.

However this only gets topicalised in bare for & while but not if.

So you could do...

for (something_exists) {
do_something_to($_);
}

... as long as something_exists doesn't return a list :)

More common approach I've seen in Perl (and other languages where variable declarations return its value) is this:

if (my $it = something_exists) {
do_something_to($it);
}
FPGAs are also stuck in a lot of niches. Economically, any high volume application where they could useful also means that putting an investment into more custom silicon is then feasible to get a better price margins - ASICs, DSPs, or I recently learned a bit about metal-gate arrays which seem to be mid-way between FPGAs and hard silicon designs.

They're stuck in a power niche because they're comparatively high power vs many embedded ICs, and if you're using a lot of power, as you said more desktop chips are economic to apply.
Only if you program into the computer what is wrong and what is right.
“All I can say right now is the U.S. government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me,” he said. “Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.”

Beautiful.
Functory, OCamlMPI and Netmulticore (part of OCamlNet). I haven't actually used any of them though, I'm quite happy with Lwt for now.
Modern games are not better designed. Quite the opposite.
It's very easy to make a hard game. Making a fun game, on the other hand, requires talent. When you have a fun game you can sell it no matter how hard it is.

A game that is not fun still can be sold pretty well - you just need to make it look pretty, invest into advertising and make it easily accessible so people could assess its high production values. This works because most of the competition is not very fun either.

The reasons why the modern game design is not producing fun games in any significant numbers are up for debate. Personally I agree with the Richard Garriott's opinion [1] but I don't believe it's the only reason.

[1] http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/19/richard-garriott-game-desi...
Is there any concrete proof as Obama is saying ?
How about like in this link http://itshumour.blogspot.com/2010/06/twenty-hilarious-funny...
many buyers appear to be buying from them as their primary store-browsing channel

I just realised - I don't think I've ever "browsed" the app store. I've only ever searched for the thing I'm looking for, and used the first 10 results to gauge whether it exists. It didn't seem worthwhile because I knew there were squillions of apps, so why try to read through them one by one?
These words will make you a terrorist (according to NSA)
Too bad this occurs when the Eurozone is taking the plunge :) There may not be an unique currency still left in Europe 10 years down the road.
He absolutely nails it. There are so many things wrong with the new design, but the biggest issue is a loss of clarity. If I would hand an iOS7 device to my mother, I would not be sure, she would have an easier time with it than with an Android device. They give up so much clarity, which was their last remaining big USP.
This can go both ways, often the reps don't have enough domain knowledge to offer you anything that will actually improve ROI. Assuming you already know your way around the adwords basics.

They may actually suggest broader terms and higher bids which will cost you more.
* cost of goods and services drop significantly (trade 'agreements' only serve to make things more expensive for the end consumer to benefit a small number of producers)
* cost of transport of goods and people drop significantly (think self-driving vehicles)
* fiat currencies (USD, EUR, GBP, JPY etc etc) disappear to be replaced by market-chosen alternatives (gold, silver, bitcoin??)
* average standard of living across the planet increases - this is a corollary of the previous three points.
A similarly anti ad-business idea: an extension that randomly clicks ads in a background.
I had a very similar experience back in the 90's when buying a PC in a non-branded store. So let's be careful with extrapolating here.
I guess now I see why people say "You misspelled ad block plus" when someone recommends ghostery.
Which is stupid. I would think to myself I am being accused of a crime, I better remain silent lest they try to pin this on me.

I have tried being polite, but it's quickly getting to the point where the righteous indignation is such that you want to resort to cursing the judge for his moronic legal fiction to justify this.