skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I dispute that the C paradigm squanders GPUs. OpenCL and CUDA are the two most prominent languages written with GPUs in mind, and both have a lot more in common with C than with Haskell. In particular they eschew functional mainstays like recursion, linked lists, and garbage collection. So for GPUs, it seems like the ideal paradigm is closer to C than Haskell.

I think the more obvious explanation is that it's much easier to write a compiler for C than for Haskell. Thus the first tooling available for any new system is almost always C. It doesn't mean C's the best tool.

>For vector units, there’s some recent excitement about auto-vectorization in Haskell. But I’m skeptical about the potential of auto-vectorization in general, since it only seems to apply to simple loops, and can’t take advantage of all instructions. Most effectively vectorized code uses either compiler intrinsics or outright assembly, and I don’t see that changing any time soon (I’d love to be proven wrong on this though).

We'll have to wait and see on this.

>Lastly, multicore processors. C++11 more or less standardized the creaky POSIX threading model, with some additions like thread locals - hardly state of the art. I wonder if the author is familiar with other approaches, like libdispatch, which provide a much improved model.

My experience is that alternative approaches to something as fundamental as parallelism never take off, because they can't gather an ecosystem around them (I'm looking in particular at the chaos of approaches available in perl and especially python). I think a modern language needs to have a single, obvious, preferred way of achieving parallelism/concurrency that libraries can build on top of (and that's why javascript has been so successful - while it's a terrible language in many ways, there is one and only one way you handle parallel-type problems, and it's (slightly) better than the standard way in other languages)
The wording and the slide images at the 5C/5S presentation were definitely calculated to give the impression that M7 was an actual chip with its own package http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZac8af1L4E#t=619 . Phil Schiller even explicitly says "the M7 chip" at 11m52s in the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZac8af1L4E#t=11m52s .
When I read the ASK HN headline, I immediately thought of stealing. Petty theft, that is. To make stealing a career, I imagine it would take a lot of work if you don't want to be caught - probably just as much as a legitimate job.

I've seen things that would be pretty easy to steal and net a criminal something equivalent to a good year's salary, but criminals are generally stupid and blow their ill-gotten gains on stupid things, meaning they then have to steal again to maintain their lifestyle.
The multiplication table really bothers me. It's considered to be the least a child can learn in elementary school. And kids that haven't learned to do math mentally just memorise it like a poem. I really don't think this is the correct approach.
To use your example -- how desirable is it to generalize "I change my name" to something "reusable"?

I'm finding these days that a pairing of .feature to corresponding step definition file allows for fluid language, simple step definition code, and well-compartmentalized messes (as opposed to the big ball of mud that Cucumber step definitions often become). Code reuse can happen through test helper classes that are called from step definitions as needed. (FactoryGirl would be an example of a very generalized test helper class, in my mind -- but more system-specific ones can be handy, albeit one wants to avoid making stateful / complex test helper code!)
> "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."

He said that because his language gets an inordinate amount of complaints.
The problem with the battery statistics is that even though an app that is causing battery drain it might not be registered with that app. Imagine an app that sends a 1kb probe message every 15 seconds in the background thus keeping the radio alive the entire time (i.e. never allowing it to idle). I believe that the battery drain caused by the radio usage would count towards "Android System" and not the app when in reality the app would be shortening your phone battery lifetime significantly.

Assigning battery usage to apps is a hard thing as there are so many grey areas. OTOH you will notice apps that are stuck in CPU expensive loops that will not terminate, however this is not that common in my experience.

The Android battery statistics are nice but they usually don't provide me with a useful answer to the question: Which app is really draining my battery.
Active Directory is basically just an implementation of an LDAP server and Kerberos. There are plenty(1) of commercial and high quality open source implementation on various forms of Unix and iOS is Unix. Wifi bandwidth is increasing all the time. Many laptops nowadays don't have ethernet ports. iPhones don't have viruses either.

Most of the problems you mention are problems for PCs, but beyond the PC world they're non-issues. Ask your Unix server support team the last time they had to deal with a virus on their machines.

I remember when the iPad came out someone I think on HN posted that he needed to be able to print to a portable bubble jet printer and iPads didn't support that, so therefore they would never catch on. Seriously, that was his contention. Everyone thinks their own little world is the entire universe. Blackberry and the tech press were adamant iPhones would never encroach on BB's corporate sales because iPhones don't play well in corporate environments. We all now know how that went down. In theory everything you mention is a problem, but in practice they can be worked around or are just non-issues.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LDAP_software
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The lack of outcry concerning this revelation is disturbing. It seems like more attention is being paid to whether or not the telecom firm informed the Belgian government in time, than the fact that a European ally is spying on us.
>So, when Apple said that the MINIMUM screen size for tablets was 10" people talked with their wallet and this was the right size.

When Apple released iPad Mini people talked with their wallet and this was a right size along the regular iPad?

Is there even a question here?

Nobody said "10 was the one and perfect size until Apple added 7". Just that Apple releasing a 10" only, for the first versions of the iPad, was a wild success.

Apple had decided to release a 10, and then they decided to add a 7 to that line. Both were mass bought. So clearly both were good market decisions.

Other vendors had a 7 even before -- their sales were 1/10 the iPad 10 available at the time or less.

>Really, do you have top put a nonsensical analogy to try to defend the indefensible?

The "indefensible" being a company offering a specific feature set of their choice and not every possible feature desired by some users or offered by some competitor?

If the resulting products sell well, then surely, they didn't make a mistake in ommiting stuff.

I don't know how you can defend the contrary. Based on some unalienable right to get what you like in a specific product from a specific brand?
Some quick thoughts, as the parent of a high school freshman:

* If you anticipate your child being assigned 3 hours of homework in a typical evening, it is negligent to allow them to start that work at 8:00PM. Instead of allowing his daughter to watch episodes of Portlandia on her computer all afternoon, he could consider a rule suggesting homework gets completed before electronic entertainment; that's our rule this year (for the first time) and it's working better than I thought it would. Another rule we have: complete or not, homework is done at 9:30PM.

* Japan (a) does not outperform the US (at least on PISA) when normalized for income, which normalization also normalizes for homework load, and (b) has the some of the longest school days in the world, with an abbreviated, homework-encumbered summer break to boot. Japanese students probably do not work less hard than US students, or to greater effect.

* If your daughter answers "Texas City" as the state capital of Texas, the discussion of how she's struggling academically might range farther than homework load, eh? Neither my son in high school nor my daughter in middle school has ever to my knowledge had state capitals homework, and neither would give that answer.

* If your daughter has spent middle school staying up until 1:00AM completing homework†, so much so that you are in open conflict with the school over that load, why oh why would you go out of your way to enroll the kid in a highly selective public school that is virtually assured to maintain or increase that load? We had homework-intensive school options for the boy, too, and (sanely) decided not to avail ourselves of them. Is this a status obsession thing? Because if the end goal is a push to get your kid into an Ivy, stop bitching about workload. You're choosing to make your kid compete.

Minus the cannabis (I substituted Unix exploit development), I had a similar high school experience to this author. I'm not generally in favor of homework and would if asked by any of my kid's teachers --- who do actually coordinate to even out the workload --- vote for less of it. But I think the parent in this article is suffering from a couple problems of his own creation, and has probably not come up with an indictment of the US school system.

† Never once has either of my kids had a middle school workload that kept them up late at night.
hit the 'System Report' button.
A better way to look at sqrt(2) * sqrt(2) is:

sqrt(2) * sqrt(2) = 2^(0.5) * 2^(0.5) = 2^(0.5+0.5) = 2^1 = 2
Nielsen TV ratings to include monitoring on digital devices starting in 2014
You can try http://eatponies.com for persistent drawing with other people.
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This doesn't make sense -- why should the random person suffer at all? Your personal utility would be equally well-served by a browser plugin that made your password fields visible.

It's not technically difficult, so if it doesn't exist, it wouldn't take much to create.
At this point, I think the only codec CCCP installs by default is LAV, and it may not even include any other codecs anymore; it's called a codec pack mostly for historical reasons. The main advantage of CCCP is that it has sensible default settings and a good configuration app. It also installs various non-codec DirectShow filters for stuff like subtitle support.
I thought you weren't an American.
There are hundreds of builds you could go that work in certain situations.

And then there are builds that usually don't work in a situation, but some people can use it because of their superior micromanagement or macro.

What you probably mean is the metagame - that definitely exists and constantly changes, but in a best of 3/5/7 setup you'll usually see players use multiple builds, either as a reaction to the build the opponent used in the last game, or due to the map you are playing on and sometimes just to try catching the opponent off guard by doing something unexpected
The first thing you described is what is called "Fermi estimation". Basic mental arithmetic is being able to do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in your head. That kind of arithmetic is strictly a prerequisite for Fermi estimation. The main purpose of Fermi estimation is not to make the calculation easier (although it can be used for that too), but to get answers while not having very good data.

For example, the other day I was trying to figure out, supposing I built a small 4-foot deep swimming pool in an apartment (not on the base floor), if I could expect it to weigh less than what the builders would assume the floor needed to be able to tolerate over that area. I didn't know the mass of a cubic foot of water off the top of my head, so I went off of guessing at how many 2 liter bottles would fit in the volume, and how much a crowd of people would weigh if they all clumped together tightly. Based on these estimations, I knew my answers would be within an order of magnitude of reality. Since the first answer was several orders of magnitude larger than the second answer, I knew that the final answer to my question was "no".

I generally do this kind of thing several times per day, because my brain is filled with crazy ideas like building swimming pools in apartments.

The answers Feynman came to could be done with ordinary mental arithmetic, assuming you have good tools (better than I have) for moving numbers between working memory and short term memory, and the tricks he used to get there faster are shortcuts you simply learn with time and practice.

But basic mental arithmetic is very similar to pen-and-paper arithmetic. The main differences for me are small mechanical adjustments to make use of results that I have cached. For example, if I'm doing division, it might be easier to multiply the number by four first, and then divide by four at the end. And of course if I'm getting a rough estimate, I'll do some rounding here and there to make things more convenient.

The other major difference is that I usually reduce a fraction as far as possible before doing long division, since that makes the multiplication steps (necessary for getting the remainder) simple table look-ups instead of long-multiplication.

But the basics are exactly the same.
I don't doubt that playing Starcraft will build mental abilities. But if someone is playing Starcraft to become smarter, then they should probably think about other activities that will give you the same benefits in a faster and more domain relevant way.

It's a great game. I love watching it. And I support professional players because they provide a source of entertainment. But it's not anything more than that.
Ask HN: Are Client side JavaScript loaders really worth the hassle?
I've gone from using multiple script tags, to basic uglification, to AMD/Require.JS to Browserify+Grunt. I can definitely some advantages as you explicitly import things, however, every time I find a new library, I have to ponder what things I'm going to have to do in order to get it to actually work with this rather heavyweight system. I mean, if I could get it down to simply being a CoffeeScript watch with some sort of minification process (plus support for Bower packages, of course), it might make my life a whole lot simpler. Currently I'm using AngularJS, d3, CoffeScript and a bunch of other libraries (e.g. Bootstrap/Angularstrap).

What is your ideal JavaScript/CoffeeScript workflow?

How do you get bower packages working?

How easy is it to integrate other packages that aren't made properly (or broken bower packages that browserify+debowerify cannot find)?

What advantages does browserify actually give you?

How do you change things between debug and production?
The "cyber-bullying" thing seemed janky when I read it. We don't know exactly what he wrote to the other parents, or the tone of the conversation they had. We know that one parent was alarmed enough by the conversation to (apparently) forward it to the school administration. It may have been nastier than the author is crediting it for.
So what happens in a situation like long polling?

Suppose no data is being transferred for 60 seconds ... is the radio kept on at maximum power? Or does it power down in between? Or does it turn off and break the poll (abort the TCP connection)?
CDex is good but sadly Sourceforge are no longer trustworthy. As far as I know they're currently only bundling crapware with installers with the project maintainer's permission, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to rely on this remaining the case.
>Effective schooling could never occur on such a federated level.

Really? You think that state run education is terrible all over the globe? I don't think the problems with the US system are universal. Certainly here in the UK, education is pretty good. The UK is smaller, but we're only talking a factor of five here.

Asking people to educate their own children is unrealistic. Teaching is not easy. Good teaching requires intelligence, skills, knowledge and understanding that most people don't have. Private tuition requires a lot of money, which most people don't have. You can claim these things are a cop-out, but I think you're being naive. You are a successful high school dropout. Which means you're probably very smart, motivated and independent. Most people are not like you. It's unrealistic to judge other people by your own standards. Most people need education while they are young in order to give them vitally important abstract thinking skills they simply wouldn't be able to figure out on their own. Most people are not capable of providing such an education for their own children. Education has always been a mechanism of control, but that's because most people need to be taught some measure of control. The people that don't need it can think for themselves anyway, so it doesn't matter.
Starlight - Visual Information System
If you need ascii art to find your way around your code I think you're doing something wrong.
Inside The U.S. Army's Secretive Star Trek Surveillance Lair
There is a lot of oldschool guys who are very professional developers in their fields, but who are reluctant to change their OS. I don't think the latter is good or wise, but they are still very knowledgeable in their field. E.g. it's not uncommon to see an embedded Linux developer who uses Windows as his desktop OS.
Starlight - History Channel
AdSense is a product for publishers that allows to monetize their traffic.
AdWords ia a product to place ads on google search and google display network which includes google properties (youtube, gmail). They are two sides of the same coin, directed on publishers and advertisers respectively.
I think the results of multiplication of small integers should be remembered from frequent use, rather than explicitly committed to memory. Acting as if these values are a member of a group that must be memorized like state names, as if they are arbitrary, distances students from understanding that they can easily determine a multiplication result by calculation if they don't know it (or 'remember' it).

I think we might be working from a different idea of what memorization means. I associate it with a truly rote impression of abstract strings with no attempt at comprehension of their meanings individually (as alluded to in the article). I'd think something like Spanish phrases require comprehension to be used.

Definitely one problem was lack of coordination between teachers in the area of homework load; sometimes teachers would arbitrarily declare that we needed to be spending twice as much time on their class for a period of time.

I suppose teachers may think the student workload is reasonable because they have their own. Overall I think that would reflect a lack of understanding that it's improper to expect another person's child's world to be almost entirely composed of your governments school plan. Academically, I learned far more outside of school reading and programming on my own, and in music lessons outside of school. The teacher is being compensated monetarily for their time and that is his or her choice.
I'd argue that Haskell (which is what I use professionally, can't speak for Scala) lets you write your less well designed code for shipping, and then refactor it later into something clean. There's a very low cost to changing code, so you worry less about getting it right the first time.
I'd be interested too!
I think on iPad, the easiest thing is to have a fixed toolbar at the top of text area.
(But still, this repo is a very nice work!)
I'm enjoying your comments. Regarding the crypto: that's too bad, because a big chunk of crypto involves de minimis math, and that chunk is the most useful; crypto is as much algorithms and computer science as it is math. Consider letting us beat you over the head with crypto challenges sometime; we wrote them in ASCII text, so there's no notation. :)
How We Got To Our Modern Health Care System (This American Life)
Strike 1/2/3:

I asked.. to.. Strike.. hipsters

Hurray! I can misquote as well :D
Possibly the worst Facebook ad ever
We recently built openmic.io to add sound annotation to pictures & websites. This pops up just as we started looking into real-time collaboration. I guess it validates the need for better in-context collaboration tools.
I am way, way, WAY more concerned about the ethics my kid learns than I am about whether he gets a B or an A in World History.
"The above code will transform all the elements with the .editable class into HTML5 editable contents"

I think that means contentEditable, which is how Medium works. (Part of the "death to textareas" movement.)

Also, it's a cool library, but to state the obvious, I hope they change the name.
I suppose most people here aren't familiar with Cringely and his completely off-the-wall "revelations", using just enough facts and tossing in a few plausible (and deniable) "pseudo-facts" to spin a good yarn.

FYI, iOS7 does _not_ support a mouse. Yes, there were jailbreak hacks for it. No, Apple has no interest in making the OS navigable with a mouse (even though the changes involved are actually pretty minor). Yes, apps can try to go their own, but good luck with trying to pair any other HID device besides a keyboard (or a few custom devices such as styluses) at this point.

Also, as someone who's been successfully living off an iPad as a thin client (using SSH+RDP to a remote X11rdp server), yes, the iPad makes a kick-ass thin client, good enough for you to develop in (despite the screen size). It was even better when I could use Citrix/ICA, but perfectly usable in every respect.

But, again, Apple doesn't care about thin clients - otherwise they'd have shipped a working ARD (Apple Remote Desktop, an enhanced VNC protocol with proprietary extensions) from day one. What they believe in is a nice, smooth, local integrated experience.
Your mass is far lower, though.
When I drop my daughter off at 6:45 AM (school starts at 7:30), sometimes their football team is out on the field practicing under lights.