skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Am I the only one who doesn't view Bradley Manning as both a Hero and being guilty of commiting a crime?
Are the two mutually exclusive?

I for one hope he is pardoned and recognised for his actions, or at least as he goes through sentencing appeals he is given time served, but he did steal classified documents. That we now believe that theft is of benefit to the world, does not mean that he didn't commit the crime.
Xbox360. Went from Sony completely dominating the market with PS2 (155 million devices sold), to Xbox360 and PS3 going head to head (78 vs 78 million). And they didn't do it by leveraging Windows, Office or forcing anybody.
Can you expand on what's wrong with declarative design? I'm not talking about UML, but modeling specifically.

Since I've been doing it for quite a few years I guess I know a thing or two about MDA/MDE. And it's not about disdain for writing code.
Love that you use Youtube for this, as you can rewind and watch from the start if you join in late. Also lag free compared to other streaming services out there.
I'm not a native dev so I can only speculate, but based on my personal experience with Android the past few years, I don't think so simply b/c there's no better alternative yet, performance-wise at least.

On mobile, native still offers better performance and integration than html5/javascript apps, the network latency is more variable and less manageable than with wired broadband, and Android and iOS are tuned more to manage resource usage and even hibernate all but the currently active app if necessary.

And I'm not sure how much flexibility native SDK's provide developers to decide where things like rendering get done anyway. There's definitely some subset of stuff that can be done serverside, hence the existence of Parse and Stackmob, but I don't know the details. There may not be much choice in the matter.
> I'm operating under the good faith assumption that hatsix actually hasn't come across any discussions relating server bans and net neutrality before reading your comment and the original article. That's what I took his comment to mean.

Even if he hadn't, the article quotes Google itself as promoting a particular server-based application as benefiting from net neutrality. That should be enough to demonstrate some level of hypocrisy.
Mtgox is aiming to do this. That way if you both have mtgox accounts its just a database update.
Try hungarian.
Use extendscript or the creative suite extension builder SDK.
Unless you're writing IA64 microcode, you don't really program a computer. You explain your desires to a compiler using a vocabulary as expressive as is possible for it to comprehend, and then it uses whatever intelligence is at its disposal to program the computer.† The more intelligent the compiler (e.g. GHC with its stream-fusion), and the more expressive the vocabulary it knows (e.g. Erlang/OTP with its built-in understanding of servers, finite-state machines, and event-handlers) the higher-level the conversation you can have with it is.

Your conversation with the compiler is actually the same conversation a client would have with you, as a software contractor. From the client's perspective, you play the role of the compiler, interrogating and formalizing their own murky desires for them, and then coughing up a build-artifact for them to evaluate. This conversation just occurs on an even higher level, because a human compiler is smarter, and has a much more expressive vocabulary, than a software compiler.

...but the "goal" of compiler and language design should be to make that distinction, between the "software compiler" and the "human compiler", less obvious, shouldn't it? The more intelligence we add to the compiler, and the more expressivity we add to the language, the more directly the programmer can translate the client's desires into code. Until, finally, one day--maybe only after we've got strong AI, but one day--the client themselves will be the one speaking to the compiler. Not because the client will be any better at knowing how to formalize what they want than they ever were (that's the dream that gave us the abominations of FORTRAN, SQL, and AppleScript) but because the compiler will be able to infer and clarify their murky thoughts into a real, useful design--just as we do now. Wouldn't that be nice?

---

† If you use a language-platform that includes garbage-collection, for example, then you're not targeting a machine with "limited resources" at all; garbage-collection is intended to simulate an Abstract Machine with unlimited memory. (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2010/08/09/10047...)
> Sometimes, the major advances come when fresh ideas are infused from the outside.

I agree with this largely; over-specialization leads to myopia (often accompanied by emotional attachment to one's work).

> In Darwin's case it was his geological work that inspired his theory.

If you read On the Origin of Species, you'll see that Darwin started from very simple observations about cross-pollination leading to hybrid plant strains. He spent years studying various species of animals. In the book, he begins out very modestly, following step by step from his Christian foundations, without making any outrageous claims. The fossils he collected on his Beagle expedition sparked his interest in the field, and served as good evidence for his theory.

> In concurrency maybe it will be ideas from neuroscience.

Unlikely, considering what little we know about the neocortex. The brain is not primarily a computation machine at all; it's a hierarchical memory system that makes mild extrapolations. There is some interest in applying what we know to computer science, but I've not seen anything concrete so far (read: code; not some abstract papers).

> We are only at the beginning of this paradigm shift to massively multi-core CPUs.

From the point of view of manufacturing, it makes most sense. It's probably too expensive to design and manufacture a single core in which all the transistors dance to a very high clock frequency. Not to mention power consumption, heat dissipation, and failures. In a multi-core, you have the flexibility to switch off a few cores to save power, run them at different clock speeds, and cope with failures. Even from the point of view of Linux, scheduling tons of routines on one core can get very complicated.

> In HW there are many promising advances being explored, such as GPUs, Intel Phi, new FPGAs, and projects like Parallella.

Ofcourse, but I don't speculate much about the distant future. The fact of the matter is that silicon-based x86 CPUs will rule commodity hardware in the foreseeable future.

> [...]

All this speculation is fine. Nothing is going to happen overnight; in the best case, we'll see an announcement about a new concurrent language on HN tomorrow, which might turn into a real language with users after 10 years of work ;) I'll probably participate and write patches for it.

For the record, Go (which is considered "new") is over 5 years old now.
Yowza, I keep being impressed by the alacrity with which Docker based ecosystem components keep popping up.
Just a FYI: Litecoin does NOT confirm faster than bitcoins. Based on how the core bitcoin protocol works (which litecoin does not alter), a halving in confirmation time is also a halving in reliability of the confirmation.
Man, can't believe this was 12 years ago.. History repeats itself
Technically, he was eating something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6131711
He doesn't do consulting any more: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/07/17/kalzumeus-podcast-5-quit...
Your comment — particularly your final graf — reads to me like a big ol', "Don't hate the player, hate the game." And while, for some games, I think that's a completely legitimate attitude, I really have a lot of trouble swallowing it in this context.

As a Federal judge, he has tremendous power to effect change in the matters that come before his bench, and yet FISC is, to all appearances, a rubber stamp with a security clearance. To the extent that's actually the case, I don't think hating the player is unwarranted, as it's exactly that kind of player who has made — and continues to make, with every unquestioned encroachment — the game the bowl of suck that it is.
A tablet with office and a web browser was a great idea for corporates...and then they prevented RT from joining domains.
Fourth talk: Jeff Lindsay from the Dokku and Flynn projects talks about his experience with docker, requests, complaints etc. Also calls for a bittorrent implementation of the image registry.
On mobile devices it would seem sensible to also run your benchmark until the battery is "flat", it might be a crude heuristic but it probably the best you can do with product devices where you can't easily break out power rails and the like.

You should treat benchmarks with a heavy pinch of salt, simply because it's caught up in the bullshit messaging world of marketing where the aim is just to produce the bigger or smaller number where appropriate.

The necessity to satisfy marketing ignores a lot of things. Benchmarks often translate poorly to real use.

Does GLbenchmark 2.7 provide any useful insight into the performance of the top fifty games in the Android mobile market? Probably not with a few 3d heavy exceptions.

Some benchmarks will never die, you'll still see Dhrystone trotted out to this day.
http://www.eejournal.com/archives/articles/20090602_coremark...

And then you hit a grey area where software can behave badly on one piece of hardware versus the other because of implementation. So if the benchmark hits this area, is it a hardware problem or a benchmark software problem?
How Unknowingly Consume Designs Everyday
The Apple store gives discounts to employees of other IT companies as well: IBM, SAP, Dell, HP, etc. The list is pretty extensive. Just ask for it and don't forget to bring your company badge :)
> All of those can return their /8. That's 18 /8 potentially available.

If say, Apple is using at least a little bit of that /8 here and there (safe assumption, no?) its going to be hard for them to return it. I'd wager corporations that have /8s have policies that rely on the assumption that they have the whole /8.

So I wouldn't hold my breath on getting one back from them.
Reminds me about Nvidia with their fake benchmark several years ago
You can basically write Java in Scala, you just have to change some small bits of syntax. There are no major semantic differences in the Java-esque subset of Scala's functionality.
How Android Phone Update Deployment process work
Woolly mammoth DNA may lead to a resurrection of the ancient beast
Oh. Sorry about misreading there.

But seriously, while programmers are pedantic sometimes, when I'm running a website out of my basement that's a 'server' by ANY definition. If google is only going to enforce the rule on business servers, they should say so.

And it doesn't matter what other ISPs do, we already know they're horrible.
If they had simply targeted RT at corporates and Pro at consumers this would have all turned out very differently.
Incredible for someone, but not for me.

I haven't opened up Office since 2009. And the only reason that I opened it then is that I was getting attachments from Office docs from users who used it to communicate stuff with me that could have been more effectively communicated in plain text emails.
Ready meals, yeah?)

I do remember times when there were essentially two choices - Debian or RH. There was also Suse, but the madness of making everything look like Netware, with standard, classiesc UNIX tools replaced by some home-brew programs with dozens of parameters nobody knew. It died long ago, thank god.

The advantage of Debian was that it was de-facto standard academia linux. Which means more-or-less stable and well tested, while some designs were (and still) lame. apt is such a lousy mess compared to RPM.)

Then the wave of migration from proprietary UNIXes to cheap Linux systems began, and RHEL flourished, being the OS of choice if you wish to run Oracle or Informix (the second was very impressive and still is). RHEL at that time was actively developed, well-tested, and even went through a painful transition to NTPL.

Then good people made CentOS from RHEL's sources and nowadays it is still default choice for some stable, but little bit lagging behind the popular distros Linux (it is still on 2.6.x kernels)

Then was the raise of Ubuntu. Well, it is popular, which almost never mean good.) Nevertheless for the wast majority Linux = Ubuntu. Leaving aside the crazy habit of incorporation of any new shinny crap invented by freedesktop guys, such as various init, management and settings "services" it is quite stable, and well-tested, indeed. Btw, comparing to the glorious days of 2.4 to 2.6 migration, or that NTPL stuff, there are almost no problem with core libraries and tools.

So, does anyone need a new distro? My answer is NO. It is quite easy to reduce CentOS or even Ubuntu (or Fedora, which is also infected by systemd madness) to a minimal and stable set of packages. All you need to do is exclude all Gnome-related stuff with dependencies, keeping image and fonts manipulation libraries, and X11 libs to be able to recompile popular packages.

The key idea here is begin with already many times tested sources, such as CentOS .srpm (got through tests by two separate teams) or Ubuntu's packages, cutting off unnecessary dependencies. Then you will have compatible and well-tested OS for containers or whatever else sales people call the banal para-virtualization.

Setting up your own yum repository is a matter of few hours, Debian packaging is more messy, but manageable. This is what sysadmin's job all about.

Btw, vendors such as Amazon already have done this job, so if you hate system administration (which is a sign that shopping might be a better future ,) just re-use these images - it is much better than some new "core OS".

The so-called "minimal install" of Ubuntu is also fine, and all you need to do is re-compile important packages, such as MySQL the way you like it and place them to your local repo.
Returning them would only delay the inevitable by a matter of months.

Deploy IPv6 today, it ain't hard.
Groups are the building blocks of society
The sad thing is that I know that there are brilliant enough people at Microsoft to ask the right questions, to drill down in their focus groups and figure out that the horse & buggy owners could actually really use a buggy, not just a faster horse. As startup people, we try to do this every single time we talk to someone! But somehow the institution doesn't allow those people to ask the right questions and act upon the answers - rather, it seems to encourage the short-sighted, iterative questions that would lead to the "faster horse," or in this case a whole bunch of tiny features that miss the big picture.
And you didn't interview him?
Something I didn't know:

"A very small part of your energy comes from breaking down your muscles — but you can avoid this by doing some resistance training, otherwise known as pumping iron. The majority of your energy comes from breaking down fat."

I thought fasting would always cause your muscles to weaken. But this makes more sense for evolution. If your muscles are being used, the body takes energy from all other sources first. The preserved muscle could make all the difference between eating and not eating.
Bret Taylor's New Company - Quip - slick, functional documents on every device
A friend that used to work at Apple once told me a story of their department having a big banner over the desk of the last person to broke the build. Eventually a frustrated recipient of the banner solved the problems causing it to be brittle in the first place, and as a result had the banner himself for months. A rather unexpected disincentive to solve the problem
I also often eat only one meal per day, have never been overweight, have always (until recently) been extremely active, and as I near my 50th year I am still not carrying around a lot of extra fat.

Once in awhile, maybe every month or two, I'll go three or four days with absolutely no food but plenty of water.

I've been in better physical condition, but my doctors are happy with my current BMI.

That said, I've always felt better when I ate less food more often.
Great point. This was the actual reason I didn't buy a surface.
GTA III and Vice City are actually surprisingly good on mobile. I bought GTA III on a whim when I got my Nexus 7 last year with the Play store credit that came with it, and I actually loved it. It took me probably 20 minutes to get a feel for the controls and ended up playing the game all the way through after a while (halfway through Vice City now). Rockstar really nailed the controls for the touch interface, at least on a tablet.
Indieverse a platform for independent game developers
Introducing Quip
For libraries: if push comes to shove, you can just use Java libraries. The bridging is extremely easy (invisible in most cases"
bingo, this remembers me of people not having time to get bored and then innovate by giving your mind some free space to go around.
The typical scenario of the problem solution once you give it a break....
Well yes, but they mention that the reason for this was because the defense could reasonably expect to obtain these documents from the prosecution, and that they didn't want to duplicate their efforts by re-compiling all the evidence.
Just tried it on a program I had lying around and PyPy3 2.1b1 took about 37 times the time that PyPy 2.0.2 takes to run it. So, yeah, some performance regressions, but it's still great news that Python 3 support is here!
Australia's latest (decent) supercomputer
Apparently 24th fastest, nice to see the Govt shelling out for some decent power for once.
Well I think the argument is that the reliability is increased by using scrypt instead of SHA256 which makes it harder for someone to control more than 50% of mining and that the result is about even.
Pretty much all major hardware vendors selling into a performance space get caught in this kind of game. This certainly isn't new behavior, though it's the first time I've seen a handset vendor try it.

But as far as why people keep buying the products: sadly it's because they're better. I'm looking at the GS4 (i9505, not the Exynos one) right now vs. the HTC One and Xperia Z. On paper, they're all basically the same phone (2G quad core snapdragons with 1920x1080 screens). But all the tiebreakers (really, all of them) go to the Samsung phone. The GS4 is slightly smaller, thinner, and lighter yet its screen is slightly larger. It's CPU is clocked higher and its battery is larger. It's cameras are better (much more so than the HTC, slightly more so than the Sony). It has a removable battery where the others don't. It has a sdcard slot where the HTC doesn't. It supports the "T-Mobile" HSPA+-on-AWS-band frequencies. It has a thermometer, hygrometer and barometer built-in.

It's just a better phone on everything quantifiable. Not so much so as to kill the competition, but to anyone paying attention and recommending hardware to their friends, they're doing an awful lot right.
Everybody thinks about garbage collection the wrong way (2010)
>Starving people die from lack of protein, not low body fat. [...] Calories and stored fat have little to do with it. A fat person will die of starvation before a muscular person.

Don't be ridiculous. If you use up your glycogen reserves, and then your fat reserves, you are dead. You need energy to live, and it has to come from somewhere. You can die of protein deficiency, but it's definitely not the sole cause of death by starvation, and I doubt it's even the leading cause of death by starvation.
It did go the other way, he was convicted by a jury before the charges were dropped.
Dead cells, liver byproducts
The power of a headshot
Why Resemble.js instead of http://pdiff.sourceforge.net/ ? Here's a presentation from a Google team using pdiff for front-end continuous deployment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMnZiTL0tUc
When I've tried to fast into the night, I wake up in the middle of the night and have to eat something otherwise I can't sleep.

Does this happen to anyone else?
Fascinating, did you do anything special with liquids other than plain old water? Lemon water?
Not sure if this is the way to win the hearts of prospective partners: caring little about the approach as to outsource personal interactions.

I imagine there's room for improvement in online dating, and can see professional help being a viable service (tips on profiles, photographer, suggesting people to contact or automating some initial contact) but I don't know if this would appeal to people?
No, the mechanism by which patents work is by temporarily banning others from using something an applicant has invented in creating. It by no means stops others competing, and it encourages innovation by making them come up with alternatives, which are potentially better, rather than settling for just the first solution discovered. Basically, I wholeheartedly disagree with your sentiment.
I agree, and I for one would gladly pay $15/month for a way to get around the paywall automatically without having to use incognito mode.
Yeah, all the fundamental things were invented and researched before I was born.) and everything is still relevant and actual even in the midst of J* mass hysteria.)
Not in Juarez. That's where most stolen cars in the southwest go to die--in chop shops.
Hrmmm ... you seem to still be tremendously missing the overarching purpose of this speech. Obviously to delve proficiently into every aspect of programming through the ages and why things are the way they are now (e.g. what 'won' out and why) would require a Course and not a talk.
You seem to think that the points brought up in this talk diminish the idea that things now DO work. However, what was stressed was avoiding the trap of discontinuing the pursuit of thinking outside the box.

I am also questioning how much of the video you actually paid attention too (note: I am not questioning how much you watched). I say this because your critique is focused on the topics that he covered in the earlier parts of the video and then (LOL) you quickly criticize him for talking about concurrency (in your previous comment)... I clearly remember him talking about programming on Massively Parallel architectures without the need for sequential logic control via multiplexing using threads and locks. I imagine, though, it is possible you did not critique this point because it is obvious (to everyone) that this is the ultimate direction of computing (synchronously with the end of Moore’s law as well).

Ahhh now that’s interesting, we are entering an era where there could possibly be a legitimate use to trying/conceiving new methods of programming? Who would have thought?

Maybe you just realized that you would have looked extremely foolish spending time on critiquing that point? IDK … excuse my ignorance.

Also you constantly argue FOR basic management techniques and methods (as if that countermoves Bret’s arguments) … but you fail to realize that spatial structuring of programs would be a visual management technique in itself that could THEN too have tools developed along with it that would be isomorphic to modern integration, testing management. But I won’t bother delving into that subject as I am much more ignorant on this and more importantly … I would hate to upset you, Master.

Oh and btw (before accusations fly) I am not a Hero worshiper … this is the first time I have ever even heard of Bret Victor. Please don’t gasp too loud.
The hardest part was social?! Really?! I've done a couple five day fasts and the hardest part is that after day three you have an effective IQ of 65. Your body shuts your brain down and you can't think clearly.

I wonder if this has an under-explored psycho-therapeutic value, actually. When you can't mentally ruminate at all anxieties definitely dissipate. I'd recommend fasting as a way to clear one's head for sure. You can't get any work done, though. You really need a week off alone.
Here's the actual source of the story as opposed to the linked blog site: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7187/looking-at-cpugpu-benchma...