skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think he's creating his own narrative: that news firms are out to "get" Apple. To punish Apple's wicked ways, or something, I dunno.

The "fact" here is that news organisations don't care what the narrative is. Journalism has two basic features:

1. Write something people will read.

2. By deadline.

If something is unusual, it gets published. If it is normal, it doesn't. If there's a deadline looming, interesting or unusual stories will not be scrutinised with any great care.

Remember: it's called "News", not "Same As Yesterdays".

Incidentally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect
The only reason I posted this article is because it appeared on my Twitter feed an hour after I saw "Fab lays off 100 employees in Europe".

Can someone please explain to me how and why on earth this company a) raised a $150M Series-D in June, b) another round of $10M today, c) total capital of $320M when they are not even profitable (read: losing money)

What kind of crack are VC's smoking? Is this another company that will disappear into the void? Another Amazon or Ikea? What?

Not a rant, just genuinely dumbfounded.
I find it interesting that so many people have a hard time comprehending Freelancing yet support entrepreneurs. An insurance or mortgage broker is ultimately a Freelancer who can sell their output to a corporation and I doubt any of them face the same strange stares.
The most useful education I got on reading function pointers is the spiral rule:

http://c-faq.com/decl/spiral.anderson.html

(I accidentally deleted my reply)
No, that is a backronym.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#Name
One great example of function pointers is in C++ when implementing inheritance. Say you have an array of Polygons, and each one has an Area() method. It turns out that some of them are Triangles, some are Squares, and some are Hexagons. polygon[i]->Area() calls a different function for each of these, and this is implemented by storing function pointers in "vtables" for each of the Polygon objects. In C++ this happens behind the scenes (you don't program this directly), but in C (or C++ for that matter if you needed to), you can get a very similar effect by storing function pointers in structs. The linux kernel makes extensive use of this programming style in driver code.
Your site practically made me pee myself with laughter. You totally nailed the tone and presentation.
I believed the government when they said that they had reason to think there were.

They did not just say they had reason to think there were, they said they were there:

Dick Cheney, Speech to VFW National Convention (August 26, 2002): "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."

Ari Fleischer, Press Briefing (January 9, 2003): "We know for a fact that there are weapons there."

Gen. Tommy Franks, Press Conference (March 22, 2003): "There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. And . . . as this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them."

Donald Rumsfeld, ABC Interview (March 30, 2003): "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
I'm sorry, are you complaining that you have to have python/ruby installed to use programs written in python/ruby, then attributing that "problem" to static site generators?
ARM actually publishes reference code under the library name "OpenMAX" for their mobile processors.

I've read ARM's source code and found they they too use the AAN algorithm for the DCT. (They provide a tonne of code for other multimedia related stuff too.)

I learned a lot from their code, even though my implementation is completely different and original.

I would also dare to say that my asm source is maintainable. I had a very hard time understanding their code as it wasn't very well documented or laid out... but nevertheless a valuable learning tool.
Those salary expectations only hold in the very top tier of universities.

From [1]: Median starting salaries for assistant professors are more like $75k. Median full professors--who are nearly 50 years old--are earning $120k. (Admittedly this does not control for field.)

That's about what a green PhD gets offered at age 28 for a data science job in SF.

[1] https://chronicle.com/article/aaup-survey-data-2013/138309#i...
I think you are overlooking the fact he is focusing on the built up "expectation".

It's perfectly obvious the media (social and news) went OTT with this story, but the follow up reality check fell flat.

That's his angle.
Slide 23: "Show me all the Microsoft Excel spreadsheets
containing MAC addresses coming out of Iraq
so I can perform network mapping"

Does MS Excel store your MAC address in the xlsx file?
Naturally.

Alexander didn't score any points for himself or his organization by coming off like he has something to defend besides American citizens.

0. The intros were more than courteous, they were gushing
1. "Holding questions to the end" was an obvious grinfuck
2. The 8 minutes of q&a seemed completely prepared
3. It also had a sense of "we're hiring"

I don't know the guy, so I don't know where he actually stands on things. So I sure as shit don't trust anything he says just yet.
The reality check is boring, as it affirms the status quo. Doubly boring because the Samsung story is yesterday's news.

It needs to overcome any number of more interesting stories that are both more timely and more novel.
The hard work behind viral vidoes
> To put the speed in perspective, SnappyCam is about 4X faster than the normal iPhone 5 Camera app, and more than twice as quick as the Samsung Galaxy S4′s 7.5 shots per second.

Does it mean that S4's hardware is faster than iPhone 5 given they're using similar algorithms, and if you'd make the same app for Android it could get even better results?
Beautiful app, jpap. Well-done! I can't wait to do some side-by-side comparisons between this and video stills, and see what kind of image quality differences there are. My overall impression of the app itself is that it's incredibly solid. Keep building apps!
For what it's worth: I don't the the NSA is at all interested in hiring Black Hat attendees. I don't mean "that's not why they're there at Black Hat, to recruit". I mean, "they don't want those people to begin with".
This looks similar to what Microsoft Research's BLINK [42] does on Windows Phone. Alas I wasn't able to find any publications on what they are doing (which is strange for MSR). As I don't have my phone currently I can't even look whether they are doing full resolution too or whether they are dropping down to smaller sizes.

[42] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/blin...
Thanks for commenting!

I've been thinking about a sabbatical type deal, though I'm concerned if I don't have focus, that'll be very challenging (and potentially put me into a depressive spiral if I'm not programming). I have a strong desire to build something, so perhaps painting or some other constructive hobby would help.
> The only place this is likely to be an issue is when a site knows you but you assume you're anonymous. If you're using a web service where you want to be anonymous, connecting anything with your identity is a bad idea.

While I wish the article headline mentioned Gravatar as opposed to Github, I think it is worth realizing that Github provides instructions to use a fake email address in your .gitconfig to protect your privacy [1] while simultaneously requiring you to provide a valid email address while setting up your account. [2]

[1]: https://help.github.com/articles/keeping-your-email-address-...

[2]: https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service#a-a...
Absolutely. That's roughly what philosophy courses are meant to do. They fire a shotgun round into the air to show you as much variance and disagreement between cogent and prominent thinkers and then ask, "So... what do you think?" (Speaking solely in terms of American education,) Literature classes also do this to a smaller extent. In elementary schools, more so but it's supposed to be done in social studies... which converts into history class later on.

These are all huge opportunities to teach ethics. We don't take them, because ethics isn't a marketable skill and has always been an implicit lesson. So we wrote standards and tests and teach to those and now here we are. Most people who graduate from high school do so believing that democracy is a flawed-but-least-flawed model of government they just have to endure, that history consists of great figures who dwarf the capabilities of the little people, and that actually understanding the breadth of our social fabric is pretty much impossible.

Ethics? Ethics is whatever doesn't piss off your best friend and still gets you laid.
Man, I hope I'll know as much as you do one day... Congrats on the app! I just bought it and I'm really liking it! One suggestion; would outputting to a gif file be too difficult? I could really see people using this to create gifs of their lives that they could share to Tumblr or Facebook.
Fortran or numerical code in C. It seems best suited for statically unrollable loops with few data-dependent branches or random memory accesses.
Wow. Just Wow.

For years all of this was in the back of my mind as being capable but my not wanting to think like a conspiracy crackpot just dismissed the thought as it couldn't be possible. A conspiracy takes a lot of co-operation from within large corporations who must also remain it a secret. Surely someone would have a conscious and leak it? Or one of companies we all look up to as a modern example of do-good company would say "Hell NO" to the attempt and then let the world know what was attempted. Guess that was eventually proven true with Snowden (a real hero imo), just shocked they were able to operate to the scale they did for so long before a Snowden came along.

In my mind, this is not so much a shock to me regarding the NSA as well as the current evil government we have had in place. Doesn't take a genius to realize the president lies to our face on TV about trivial issues/promises, so expected for top secret stuff.

What is the BIG stomach churning shock to me is the very companies that we have come to know that are multi-billion dollar conglomerates providing service/products for millions for every day use has been a part of it. A part of this secret web while all the while proclaiming privacy for it users. I guess at end of day profits still rule the roost. "Just do this for us, turn a blind eye, and you get to go on making your billions". I wonder how many CEO's knew of all this. Gates? Zuckerburg? Etc etc.

I feel like I have no outs now. There are no alternatives to current establishment of companies that make our lives easier. Should we all wipe our PC's and use Linux, sell our phones and use Ubuntu Phone, not pay for SSL certs anymore (another mafia), etc?
I want to see if you could use all the rapid frames, plus a variant of that cool Adobe image de-blurring tech [1] that was shown a while ago to produce a clearer, sharper image during motion?

[1]: http://prodesigntools.com/photoshop-cs7-image-deblurring.htm...
Automated layout analysis is pretty tricky. The data reported from the DOM is not always reliable, so it's helpful to couple it with computer vision data. I spoke about an integrated approach at Selenium Conf 2013: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF0QUD0kuiQ
It's also good to note that these links for further reading are applicable for blocks in Objective-C, which use the same syntax for declaration, only replacing the asterisk '*' with a caret '^'.
You are asking strangers the question you alone must figure out. Give yourself some time away to figure out an answer. There are no shortcuts here. You need time away and only you can do this.
I have the same issue (3), on Safari and Chrome: mouse clicks in the menus after they're opened are ignored, but the keyboard works to select a video.
Complete source code, except for the applications you want to run.
There's also the theory suggested by some (I've just watched Robert Newberg's "History of Oil" though I've seen the point made elsewhere) that it was the move by Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela to move oil sales from dollars to Euros which had something to do with the war.

Truth is the story's likely complicated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DCwafIntj0
Is me alone who sees NaCl as another kind of flash? It is just a blob running into a rectangle. No js accesible, almost no browser control over it. How web is this?
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I would be shocked if there wasn't already a Common.js implementation for the browser.

How do backers know that you are going to be able to effectively use the money this time?
Quoting out of context:

"that Apple’s market domination has been an aberration"
"that the company in the midst of an inevitable decline"

Let me know when he gets to 2010... [I wrote an email to iOS/Android friend-partisans in April of 2010 predicting the effects of Apple's TOS changes. From my perspective, the TOS itself was not the issue; the orientation to developers was the issue. Pretty much all of the predictions in that email has been realized.]

I do agree with the point that it doesn't matter whether or not Samsung sells more phones or makes more profit than does Apple. But that doesn't mean that ecosystem shifts do not matter. They do and Android seems to be on the winning side of that shift.

This is also not to discount the value of advocating for the "right" side. Dating myself, I advocated for OS/2 in 1992 but my advocacy was drowned out by the dominance of Windows. That said, OS/2 had technical underpinnings to recommend it. At this point, iOS advocacy seems to be focused more on random factors (e.g. color scheme or parallax backgrounds) and less on significant

Another factor is the strange affliction that causes
many to believe whatever is attributed to an “analyst”

I assume by "many" he means "no one" since one is either unaware of analysts or, if aware, discounting of analysts.

I'm trying to read DF's article as something besides a partisan apology/explanation, but [as usual] I'm having a hard time. Hints?
It's unclear to me, as there's a lot more going on when taking a photo than you might think. :) (I originally thought I could knock together a basic SnappyCam app on top of the JPEG codec within a week or two, it took months.)

If SnappyCam can do it on hardware that is older than the S4, then I can't see why technically Samsung can't lift their game.

And judging by how quickly they've been chasing Apple, and sometimes stepping ahead, I wouldn't be surprised to see a bit of leap-frogging for some time to come.

Let's see what the 5S/C brings in a few months! I'm excited.
Now just shows up as "Our Site is being Updated". (By a team of guys who just rolled up in identical business suits, no doubt.)
I'm curious to hear it. Also, are you a programmer?
Speaking of which, any plans for this to make GIFs :D?
(I'd just posted a related item on this)

For values of "for other things" of creating a massive flood of dollars on the world financial markets, undercutting its value, and precipitating a financial crisis the likes of which the US still hasn't seen.
3 ways to build and fund your tech startup
Thanks! :-) To be honest, none of my formal training prepared me for what went into SnappyCam---only the "how" to go about learning to do so. I'm sure you could pick up a few tricks in the same way by working on a cool pet project or two.

With so many recent requests for AGIF, I'm absolutely going to add it to the app. (It's been on my list for a while, but lower priority than getting up a solid core product and the social sharing that is in development at the moment.)
Post something new.
Thanks for commenting coopdog!

I'm concerned that as soon as I bring this up in any shape, I'll be labeled as a flight risk (and rightfully so). Right now based on the conversations I've had with peers on my team, others are planning to leave at the end of the release. If I am to stay on, my role will widen greatly and I'll need to (again) train others on the area. It'll be very very difficult for me to "run away" from my feature area given that I am the resident expert and probably one of the only people who has a coherent understanding of the end to end working of the system.

This is especially scary since due to my level, I don't believe I can be compensated appropriately for the amount of work and stress this situation would bring on. I've been rejected for promotion due to "length in level" before, so it is a long way uphill.

I appreciate your optimism about me being senior already (:)) but not all of those 10 years are post-undergrad experience, so I believe it counts for less in the eyes of an interviewer. I've been undergoing rigorous introspection trying to determine how my skills really stack up, but perhaps I just need to begin interviewing for different levels.
More technical details on SnappyLabs blog:
http://www.snappylabs.com/blog/snappycam/2013/07/31/iphone-k...
I see you as being a startup person - while startups work hard to develop a business, you are the business. While startup businesses scale out, you scale up.

Wish you best of luck in your pursuits, congrats.
> Law is complicated and filled with ambiguity because the world is complicated and filled with ambiguity.

True, yet I'm convinced by obvious ambiguity that it's on purpose, to feed the legal industry. That conviction is bolstered by all the "work" Congress does on reviving sunset clauses on laws that had no good reason to sunset.
<sigh> Just remember: Bug 3434
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3434
Here's the original text:

The Integrated Systems Group of SAIC has a career opening
for a Tier 2 XKEYSCORE Systems Engineer, for the Mission
Programs Division (MPD), located in Columbia, Maryland.

JOB SUMMARY:
The Systems Engineer will provide support for the compartment systems that encompass the SKIDROWE systems.
The successful candidate will be a self-starter, work well in a dynamic team environment, and be very organized and detailed oriented.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES:
•Provide Tier 2 cross function support.
•Support SIGINT systems by performing custom configurations of fielded mission systems.
•Assist the dataflow team to verify the formats of input and output data and the flow of data from front end sources and to back end destinations.
•Troubleshoot network and system problems and a become knowledge expert in two other components.
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS:
•High School diploma or equivalent with 3+ years of related experience installing, configuring, integrating, and testing software which run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
•Software Integration experience with scripting languages (Java, C and Bourne shell).
•Familiar with VMware ESXi 3.5, 4.1, and 5.0.
•Currently possess an active TS/SCI with Polygraph security clearance.

ADDITIONAL PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
•Bachelor's degree in a relevent technical disciplne.
•Ability to be mobile, work, and travel independently.
•Excellent interpersonal, verbal, and written communication skills with the ability to successfully interact with internal and external customers.
Kickstarter Should Do More to Protect Backers
There's also http://overtone.github.io/, which sits over super collider. Overtone provides an emacs mode, but you can also use it in http://www.lighttable.com/ which is a bit more accessible.
Where are you based? If you are in the north east US, we should start a support group :-p
It'll be interesting to find out the standard startup reaction once he takes on an additional employee and changes "No thanks, I'm a freelancer" to "No thanks, I have my own small business. But give me your card and I'll let you know if something opens up..."
Seattle. I hail from the northeast though, thinking about moving back if the opportunity arose.
As someone who has worked implementing the same algorithms on a VLIW DSP (TI C64x) and ARM and x86 a few comments after watching the beginning of the talk. It's been a while so this is from memory...

The different VLIW execution units can only process a subset of the instructions set. That means you need the right mix of instructions in your algorithm to take advantage of the full throughput. If you have any sort of serial dependency you won't be able to take advantage of all the execution slots. It basically excels at - signal processing (and even a subset of that). That said, when you hit the sweet spot it's pretty good.

When someone like TI compares their DSP to ARM they usually tend to ignore SIMD (very conveniently). SIMD (NEON on ARM or SSE on x86) can buy you almost another order of magnitude performance on those super-scalar CPUs if you're dealing with vectors of smaller quantities (16 bit or 8 bit). So while on paper the VLIW DSP should blow the general purpose superscalar out of the water for signal processing algorithms at comparable clock rates it's not quite like that when you can use SIMD. It also takes a lot of manual optimization to get the most out of both architectures.

So when you're in the VLIW's sweet spot your performance/power/price is pretty good. But the general purpose processors can get you performance in and out of that sweet spot (you're probably sucking more power but that's life).

You really can't look at "peak" instructions per second on the VLIW as any sort of reliable metric and you need any comparison to include the SIMD units...

EDIT: Another note is that for many applications the external memory bandwidth is really important. The DSPs benefit from their various DMAs and being able to parallelize processing and data transfer but generally x86 blows away all those DSPs and ARM. I guess in a modern system you may also want to throw the GPU into the comparison mix.
The last time I looked at ChucK had to have been almost 5 years ago. I was doing some interesting phase shift work where I would offset one channel by a few samples. Lots of fun.
What is actually kind of telling is that this matters so much to Gruber that he wrote a blog post about it. It is extremely important to him that there not be any undue perception that Samsung is making more profit than Apple. Why?

Because, I think, a tremendous amount of his world view and many Apple oriented folk like him, is bound up in the idea that Apple's business model is infallibly better than that of the OEM model. It just can't be true that there is more profit from making "crap" things than making "good" things can it? That selling lower quality stuff can actually be better business than premium quality? (I am of course, taking liberties with the these words). This possibility is deeply threatening to many people who have bound themselves up in the Apple ecosystem. If making better things is, in fact, worse business, what does it mean for people who care deeply about quality? There's a whole mindset, even way of life here that is dependent on this beautiful self-consistent, self-reinforcing ecosystem. Closed, centralized, controlled, designed, simplified, quality AND higher profits all go together. The fact that Apple keeps making more profits than other phone makers has been the last metric that held together this belief system. If it goes, so too while the whole notion that Apple has done something new, different and better. Their rise will once again be seen as an abberration (as he himself refers to in the post).

Of course, the fact that I felt the need to post this rant itself is also telling about me :-)
Just got this app. I've got to say— wow! So well put together, the whole everything— the app, the website, the web-based social platform. Giving $0.99 for something a person worked on for 2 years feels wrong and great at the same time, but I think enough of us will do so to have made it worth your while.
Thanks!! :D

Would love to see some real world comparison examples. Drop me a line when you've got something, would love to check it out. :)