skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's using language choice as a proxy for developer talent. It's a proxy, not a real metric of the language itself.

I'd note that pg ultimately sold to Yahoo, who a) wrote a fair bit of C in house themselves and b) were severely trounced by a competitor that initially was primarily using C++ (Google).
The fingerprint scanner uses RF to look at the layer of cells below the outermost layer of dead cells, so it's doing far more than taking a photo. (That's been covered in recent days on HN)
> I wouldn't accept your labor nor your property voluntarily, let alone seize it.

And what of the labor and property of lawyers, doctors, investment bankers, Silicon Valley multimillionaires? You're going to have a hard time delivering and paying for all the promises and investments you wrote of if you're picky about who you're willing to take from.

> Enjoy how you choose to spend your resources, I know how I want to spend mine.

That, my friend, is individual liberty. I'm glad that despite your vitriol, you seem to agree that it's a wonderful thing.

One modest suggestion, however: you shouldn't presume to know how others spend their resources. A person you're quick to curse as cold-hearted might be far more charitable than you ever imagined, and, in both relative and absolute terms, perhaps far more charitable than you.

Cheers.
Would be great if there is insider info on the process Apple made their decisions on what features to put into new product. It definitely not just marketing driven, but a mix that includes the technical and supply chain. Material for a book.
Benchmark applications are not GPUs.

Besides that, GFXBench 2.7 doesn't support ES 3.0 and that's what most of the comparisons with other current-gen GPUs have used.
It's a really cool game with some really interesting mechanics. What other games does your SO enjoy? Feel free to email jack {at} jackmcdade.com.
Why doesn't Google make a bid to take majority control of T-Mobile? It would seem like the perfect marriage.
Nope, I've been hearing it since I entered the business world in 2003

http://www.theofficelife.com/business-jargon-dictionary-A.ht...
I was homeless with 5 kids and a wife roughly 6-7 years ago. So I know how much that sucks. I hope your situation improves soon.
Gee, silly me, caring about the cellular talk time on my phone. That's the last thing anyone should use a phone for.
That's a rather cavalier attitude towards the integrity of your data ... data integrity one of my prime concerns, which it should be for any production systems.

Different projects have different resources and requirements. There's far more ways than just ZFS to provide for data redundancy and integrity (TMTOWTDI).

(Edit: why the downvote? Geez.)
Battlefield Outcomes Could Be Affected By Emotional Attachment to Robots
If you lose your nest egg in year 10 because the market takes a dump, guess what? You're not retired anymore.

It's why real-life retired people don't put their entire savings in the stock market. Retirement funds tend to have most of your money in fixed-rate securities by the time you actually quit working.
> If you really consider it, what 95% of people write these days is glue between various services, and the parts that do matter, where you need the most performance, are already written in C.

I think that is absolutely on the money?... but what if you are building one of those components?... or what if you are writing a very thin wrapper on one of those components, and it is brand new and only has C bindings?... or what if you need to be portable to dozens of different platforms, many of which don't share much toolchain overlap except for gcc?

> but I guarantee I'll probably leave a buffer overflow exploit open when trying to parse GET variables.

It's pretty easy to avoid that if you are worried about it. There are buffer/blob abstractions that give you "safe" interfaces with 0 risk of buffer overflow. Really, there is no good reason to have those unless you really are trading safety for performance.

> Or I can just do it in Java, and get all the performance and almost all the advantages of doing it in C.

Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. It depends on the problem... and your levels of skill with both Java & C.
It's seems you've been fooled by something because the fingerprint sensor is not a camera.
Great article Ryan. I had heard about the Valve Employee Handbook but never had taken the time to look at it. I just read the thing from front to back and it's pretty incredible. It seems like a pretty good balance between autonomy and making sure short term tasks align with longer term goals. Its also interesting that they do have some concept of hierarchy on project teams but thats its organic and temporary.

Looking forward to your future posts to see how you guys implement it!
Norman's point is probably precisely that you should put the flat plate/handle on as appropriate.
A big trend of sensational cryptozoology cable TV shows started around that time too.

I've known two people (a family member experienced in the woods and a close friend) who have had encounters. Not like "maybe I saw something in the bushes" encounters either. I don't think either of them reported them anywhere that would have ended up in this data set.
On the one hand, it would take a miracle or three. On the other, things have been very, very slowly improving. I cannot tell if things are about to crash and burn or finally start coming together.

I am sorry you suffered. Thank you for the well wishes.
Here's a cool example of a shipping museum that was 3D scanned at high resolution:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDTbFhFZl9I
Which carrier does this? I literally cannot think of one, even down to the bare-minimum $15/mo plans from, say, Virgin Mobile. It strikes me as one of those situations that screams "You're being scammed." Is this some flyover local carrier that I'm not aware of (I hear it complained about all the time), or is it some archaic and masochistic plan that people bend themselves over backward to whip themselves with?

Or is it simply that those are the plans that don't offer text messaging? In which case, situations like spamming black pages at remote fax machines come to mind. And all the legal ramifications involved.
As a Layman, the concept seems reminiscent of Garrett Lisi's E8 idea. Are they comparable approaches?
SlimerJS
Thanks, yep I ended up going with this. Got a pretty sweet set ( http://shop.lego.com/en-NZ/Excavator-42006 ) with the motor add on. Just trying to overcome ridiculous regional pricing now if you don't live in the states you pay though the nose ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6403660 )
Because T-Mobile is a company that actually knows how to handle customer service and tends to value its customers and employees highly; a practice that is almost antithetical to TelCo business.

The complete culture-incompatibility the two companies have would destroy the value of any purchase.

Not so perfect, really.
Thanks, trust me he is very much into Minecraft already.
I don't understand your point of quoting the article. Does it not hash with what I said above?
Once arstechnica writes about your criminal hacking enterprise, it would be prudent to re-group.
Keep in mind that there is freight to NZ (it's made in Canada), and likely an importer in NZ that is dictating prices, not Lego.

Never mind that NZ may have import tarrifs in place against the US.
I don't see it as a talent filter proxy. More of a "Does this company understand what it is getting into and therefore what it needs" proxy.

e.g. You run a skyscraper building company. If you see job ads for competitors with things like "must have excellent woodworking knowledge" you are probably less worried than those with "must have excellent metallurgy knowledge".
The paper from the arxiv mentioned in the article: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1212.5605v1.pdf
Pretty sure you still have to use plain arrays and strcmp, what are these "safe" libraries you were going to use? Unless we are talking about C++ here?

glib: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLib

There are others. Basically, if you wrap your dangerous C app in a thin, impenetrable layer of solid string processing and input validation, it's very manageable.

Valgrind and input fuzzing help considerably to work out any bugs.
C and C++ compilers can produce faster execution than Go or JVMs as they support SIMD vectorization e.g. SSE/AVX. For CPU-bound workloads you can get more than 2x speed up.

It doesn't mean you should write your entire server stack in C vs calling a C function for heavy computation, but the idea that Java and Go approach 99% the speed of C/C++/Fortran is generally only true for programs that are not optimized for performance.
That will also be the day where you need to 'jailbreak your PC' thanks to Apple.
By engineers, for engineers, I might add. No offense, but most writers on tech sites tend to be writers who are interested in technology, whereas AnandTech is full of engineers who are interested in dissecting and explaining technology. Not to pick on anyone, but if you gave the writers at The Verge, for instance, a month to review the iPhone 5S they would not cover the depth that the first page of this review covers.
Oh sweet. Have bookmarked for his older brother. Could be a good Christmas present.
> Apple remains in total control of the industry.

This is a nice phone, but I'm sorry - if you think Apple "remains in total control of the industry" with sub 20% marketshare and shrinking you are delusional.

Whatever you may think of the theorerical advantages that Apple has, its not working for them outside of the US.
That's exactly what open source can change about a field. Opening a field to contribution from people with less money but just as many ideas can only be a good thing.
Every once in a while I get the feeling that the greatest discoveries are still ahead and these next few decades might be the real "golden age of science". The "individual genius" phase is just behind us and the "collaborative brilliance" phase is just beginning.
>interesting to note that it was efinancehub.com and not a tech site that reported this

It was also reported by Wired the same day.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/09/tesla-autonomous/
I suppose a response to the spirit of the remark as a whole rather than one exemplary detail would be asking a lot.
It says it's optimized for single executing applications and "cloud workloads". Well, isn't there always going to be at least monitoring software running on my server? So that would be 2 applications already.
One advantage: the faster the hardware, the more time it can spend in idle states at the same load. So, if you manage to speed up your hardware by a factor X while increasing power usage by a factor < X, it is a net win (I don't know whether they achieve this)
Going big with your software startup idea with Erica Douglass
design for ipad,iphone,android web bookmark
Ask: What free fonts can I use in my app for in app purchase?
I'm an ios developer and created an app which allows the user to add different texts and reposition them.

I would like to provide my users with a premium feature which is a font pack. I'm looking for a few free fonts that I could embed in my app and require payment for them.

What kind of license am I looking for? Do you know of any such fonts?

Thank you
If you have essential software or hardware that only works with XP, you could buy a cheap wired-only router for each of your XP systems to keep them isolated from the rest of your network (which a friend's skeezy laptop might be trying to exploit without her knowledge when she brings it over to collaborate on a project).
Beginner's Guide: How To Localize Your iOS Apps
> Having a really sovereign country is kind of difficult.

No it isn't. All you need is a nuclear missile and you can tell anybody, including US President to piss off. And they will do it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea for details.
That's good to know that Mafia will kill me after unlocking my phone not before :)
Do you measure BMW, Rolex and Gucci, by market share? Or profit share? There are more meaningful measures than market share and picking a measure the company isn't particularly interested or aiming for in is a strange choice.
For sure, I think that there are problems today - I was just mentioning things that are never said in these diatribes. I definitely agree that the prison system is a new and significant problem in the US. I definitely disagree that the war on terror is worse because the enemy is nebulous. I'll leave it there because I could write pages and pages of crap about the ups and downs of this stuff :)
> Still an order of magnitude easier not to shoot yourself in the foot in most higher level language.

There are some best practices that tend to help you to limit the risk a lot. Still... a lot of people do web development in JavaScript, and I'd cite it as a very strong exception to your assertion.

> Pretty sure you still have to use plain arrays and strcmp, what are these "safe" libraries you were going to use?

Pretty much all of the "NULL terminated" functions have a length terminated equivalent that you can (and should) use instead. There are also blob & string abstractions available that wrap arrays and strings in structs that have fields to track the size of the allocated space, with the side benefit of making C's evil type coercion a bit harder to bump into.

> Also C supports unicode fine

Particularly if you use ICU4C, C actually has the best unicode support out there (obviously there is ICU4J which gets merged into Java regularly, but often you get stuck with an old VM with an ancient version). It's actually kind of shocking how painful it is to have full unicode support with higher level languages that really ought to know better.

> and REPL can't hardly be considered a requirement for web development considering Java, .NET and PHP* don't have REPL's.

> *Looks like PHP has some now

Not only does PHP have one, but Java has since forever (http://www.beanshell.org/), and .NET really kind of does have a few semi-reasonable options (http://www.linqpad.net/, http://www.sliver.com/dotnet/SnippetCompiler/, http://www.mono-project.com/CsharpRepl, not to mention: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb978526.aspx).

Of course, so does C (http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cint, http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cling, http://www.softintegration.com/products/chstandard/, and arguably even things like https://code.google.com/p/picoc/ or http://ups.sourceforge.net/main.html can serve if you are desperate).
In the future, the Square Kilometre Array is forecast to require 300-1500 PB/year of archiving, somewhere between 10 PB/hr and 1 EB/day of raw data. (That's 3-12 TB/s...)
No, not referring to NSA at all, and nothing specific just my overall impression. I was just trying to say that for many years I dismissed the critics of Microsoft as being biased for various reasons and was somewhat a MS defender. I now think they suck, not in the way an Apple fanboy thinks they suck, just an intangible impression.
The worst abomination I've worked with was a web app written in PL/SQL. It was lovely to maintain.
I wouldn't describe any of those companies as "in total control of their industry"
I would call them nice high end niche products.
So buy from amazon instead & ship via youshop...
Is it a CDMA thing? Because for literally the last decade and a bit, I've been taking whatever phone I want and putting it on whatever network I want here in Australia, no "carrier certification" needed...
I think the proper presentation of this material is as how Learn you a haskell[1] does it: functors, applicatives, monoids ... then monads but I don't think i've seen this done for other languages. Each of those structures should be learned as a set of properties, rather than something concrete (container, wrapper, sequencer, programmable semicolon) and then you see how important the applicative vs monadic style decision is for library design in haskell

[1]http://learnyouahaskell.com/functors-applicative-functors-an...
I did not read the paper, but from the article; probably not. So the E8 idea is stab at a quantum field theory of gravity. On the other hand these amplituhedron idea seems to be 'just' a different idea to calculate usual qft calculations easier. The only connection which may be there is, that apparently the amplituhedron idea can be turned on its head and then serve as a new way of looking onto qft. And this may or may not lead into a interesting direction for quantum gravity theories.
Property is an illusion. Still confused?
I've been getting so many recommendations for games I had to update the post. Thanks for the great feedback, I'm glad my post resonated with so many of you!

http://jackmcdade.dev/blog/why-i-play-video-games#update
The spirit of using C for web applications is: it'd be faster and simpler just to publish your root password and IP address to the web.
It may have been said many times, but the linked thread itself does not contain any official statements and is not particularly conclusive.
Just because you have enough savings to retire doesn't mean you have to retire; it just means you have the option to. And "retire" doesn't mean you have to stop doing interesting work, either. You could keep working an existing job that you enjoy knowing that it's completely optional for you, or you could spend 100% of your time doing work that doesn't necessarily pay (e.g. a startup, or working on random Open Source projects that tickle your fancy).
This isn't my field (a.k.a. I'm talking out of my ass), but I can give it my best shot. Usually with QFT you start with locality and unitarity as a sort of starting point. You might hope that you could come up with something much simpler where locality and unitarity come about naturally from the model itself (the goal of physics being to show that "it had to be this way".) QFT tells us how the world works by calculating scattering amplitudes. You throw n things in, and m things come out with some momentum, some spin, some color, etc. The way we started doing this was with Feynman diagrams... these diagrams tend to look like you have some particles banging off of some other particles, and they behave a little that way, but they're actually a notation for integrals in a series that you have to sum over. Hence the genius of the notation... they describe math while looking like something physically relevant. However, they're a little weird in that if you interpreted the diagram literally, you'd find that some of the diagrams involved in an interaction actually aren't physical! One might say that the degree of nonphysicality suppresses that diagram's contribution. Physicists describe these diagrams as "off-mass-shell." If you wish to describe an interaction, you figure out all the diagrams relevant to the interaction, calculate them and sum them. When the article says "tons of pages of calculations", what they mean is you need to sum over a LOT of Feynman diagrams to get an answer.

Now, there's some newish kinda diagram that's gone into use (I think maybe only for N=4 SYM?), which is also used to calculate interaction cross-sections. However, they're written in such a way that they always describe on-shell processes, hence why they're called on-shell diagrams. I think Zvi Bern had something to do with this. These diagrams have an underlying structure... and mathematicians have started writing similar diagrams recently (as in, they ran into a similar structure recently), but instead of the diagrams being to describe interactions, they're used to describe some structure called a positive grassmanian. The positive grassmanian in low dimensions relates to convex polygons... it's a simple thing. This guy had this interesting insight that an interaction crossection corresponds to some sort of volume... and in this case, it corresponds to the volume of this polytope described by the positive grassmanian... or something like that.

The positive grassmanian says nothing at all about unitarity or positivity, nothing about space or time, but it lets you calculate shit. That's very, very cool.
the hipmunk downhill in design show even on the app.

3 times more pixels, 1/3 of the information.
> I imagine the larger display is a similar situation, they're not happy with some compromise they'd have to make to produce a display of the larger size, whereas competitors are happy to pump something out that is better by some metric (PPI, size), but has adverse effects (battery life, color oversaturation, artifacting).

The iPad 3 is a counter-example; retina display almost for the sake of it, and the hardware suffered. The fact that Apple pushed out the iPad 4 so quickly thereafter can, IMO, be chalked up to the fact that the iPad 3 was either a stopgap device or immediately regretted internally and caused the schedule of the iPad 4 to be bumped up.
Not to mention modern computational power.
> I don't see it as a talent filter proxy.

That's fine. I was characterizing how pg was using it.

> Does this company understand what it is getting into and therefore what it needs?

I think it is actually a much poorer proxy for that. Maybe if they are a small company or don't have any engineers, that would make sense. As a company gets larger, job descriptions start to represent very small, specific parts of what a company does, and the internal context of the company often outweighs the importance of the external context that is visible to you.

As an example, when Facebook was still up and coming and had real competition, Facebook were the ones hiring C programmers, not their competitors... ;-)
Show HN: Taist - a platform to create addons for SaaS
Link: http://tai.st

Guys, I'm building a service for web developers that like to improve things by hacking, and your feedback would be very useful:

If you ever wanted to change anything in the SaaS you use, Taist can help you - with it you can create addons that add new functionality or change UX of any cloud application.

The same things you could achieve by creating browser extensions or userscripts, but Taist makes it much easier to develop and maintain and adds some useful "out of the box" features like data storage.

The platform works for several months. The website and API docs are not fancy yet, but the platform works and several addons have been created and used.

By the way, I would be happy to get an advice also on creating docs for API - now I describe it in Google Docs to edit it fast, but as it grows constantly, it becomes less and less readable.
Didn't know about R word. sure will take care of it next time.
I think you misunderstood me. I was saying that people as a rule don't feel entitled, because it's not something you feel. I wasn't passing judgement on you.

This being said, fuck you for abusing me on the basis of information you hadn't yet shared.
I think the new (iOS7) design is better simply because the transparent box on the non-selected buttons allow me to see more map.
which is idiotic.

had everyone put effort in browser integration like webos was doing, the end user would be much better served.

but lack of lock-in doesnt sell in the corporate world...
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
You'd be amazed. You can shoot, edit, and post an entire short movie from your phone, without involving any larger device. I have done it myself.

Another way to look at it: if you're not rendering video ... I think we've reached the point where faster (benchmarked) hardware adds little to no functional benefit. So why upgrade?
Physicist here: This has a higher probability of being important than your usual science blog material. The Simons Foundation is a serious entity, backed with serious funds.

Arkani-Hamed had some compelling things to say recently at a talk and colloquium at our university; looking forward to learning more.
You talk on your phone for 9.3+ hours /day between charges? That sucks, I'm sorry.
I wasn't passing judgement on you. This being said, fuck you for abusing me on the basis of information you hadn't yet shared.

It is noted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5908105 & on my blog etc. Not exactly a secret.