skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you might be right about stalls.

Here is a version of the code that runs even faster than the asm("call foo") one by inserting nops between the load and the use of the loaded value. However it became even faster by inserting a few nops at the beginning of the loop too.

The fastest version that I could find is to do a prefetch of counter at the end of the loop .... speaking of which isn't that nopw that GCC uses for alignment a prefetch instruction too? Is the CPU tricked by the fake address used there?

void prefetch() {
unsigned j;
for (j = 0; j < N; ++j) {
counter += j;
__builtin_prefetch(&counter, 0, 3);
}
}

void nop_wait() {
unsigned j;
for (j = 0; j < N; ++j) {
unsigned x = counter;
/* 4 or more nops seem right, 3 nops are slower */
__asm__("nop");
__asm__("nop");
__asm__("nop");
__asm__("nop");
counter = x + j;
}
}

tightloop:
3,000,314,154 cycles # 0.000 GHz ( +- 0.01% )
2,400,971,094 instructions # 0.80 insns per cycle ( +- 0.00% )

0.788256283 seconds time elapsed ( +- 0.02% )

loop_with_call:
3,000,314,154 cycles # 0.000 GHz ( +- 0.01% )
2,400,971,094 instructions # 0.80 insns per cycle ( +- 0.00% )

0.788256283 seconds time elapsed ( +- 0.02% )

nopwait:
2,679,341,970 cycles # 0.000 GHz ( +- 0.37% )
4,000,906,874 instructions # 1.49 insns per cycle ( +- 0.00% )

0.704209471 seconds time elapsed

vs

prefetch:
2,586,821,497 cycles # 0.000 GHz ( +- 0.54% )
2,800,888,975 instructions # 1.08 insns per cycle ( +- 0.00% )

0.679998564 seconds time elapsed

This is on a Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz
x86 instructions are often big and complicated and hard to decode, so much so that the machine doesn't use them internally in the various buffers and so forth that make up it's out of order engine. Instead, they're translated into a different set of instructions called uOps which only live inside the inner part of the CPU.

Translating them takes energy, and can potentially be the limiting factor in how faster certain programs can be run. That means that recent Intel designs keep a small buffer of uOps that correspond to instructions it's likely to see again quickly. This can help a lot in loops.
> All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people.

This is a bad opening premise. Time Warner and Comcast are huge and they don't seem like word of mouth companies to me. Boeing is pretty huge and they don't sell anything directly to ordinary consumers. I would never run around marketing Pfizer products to my friends.

Take a scan down the Fortune 500 and "viral" growth companies are in the minority.

Even limiting yourself to tech companies, which I presume is all that the author was thinking of, the principle is no less general. Epic is a gargantuan EHR vendor and they grew via acquisition of other vendors, not word of mouth. Cisco did much of the same, and consider Oracle. The list goes on and on.
I am unsure what is the relevance of water in this project. It is not like the noble gases used in other engines (including ion) are difficult to find or too expensive.

Unless there's the long-term goal of collecting water in order to 'refuel' the craft. Which is unlikely, as they are too tiny to afford thee extra machinery.

I'm thinking it's just a matter of reducing for the 'fuel tanks'.
Are there delievery lockers (Amazon or others) in the Boston area? I've looked and can't seem to find anything. Seems like this would be a natural here.
Thanks for the explanation, though it basically confirms the same picture I already had in my mind.

What you call "additional revenue for the system" is actually a government bailout by tax increase (plus inflating the money supply).

It is absolutely fraudulent. It is fraudulent to force me to invest in a fund when I want to invest my money elsewhere because I think I can get a higher return.

It is also fraudulent to force me (as a taxpayer/holder of USD) to bail out such a fund.

I called it a "Ponzi scheme" because of the idea that later "investors" pay for the prior generation of "investors"---which, like a Ponzi scheme, fails (and requires a bailout) when the next generation isn't large enough.

Admittedly, my definition of "fraudulent" above isn't true in a strict accounting sense. AFAIK the books are essential "open." Nobody is being deceived. However, it is someting worse than being deceived. It is knowing the unfortunate truth, but being forced to "invest" (and to "bailout") anyway.
i think you're bug bounty (bottom of security page) is a little out of date...

We welcome security audits and offer a bounty of 1 BTC for responsibly disclosing security issues or breaches in our client-server model. If you found a bug, please contact us at security@bitrated.com.

At the time of writing, the BTC/USD exchange rate is ~$110. If this drastically changes (to either side) we'll pay the equivalent BTC of that instead.
GPUs are generally in order as far as I know - it only does OOO optimization at compile time. In general I like high performance programming much more using CUDA than on CPU - the performance is usually much more predictable and as such the time investment tends to correlate pretty well with performance improvements.
These all seem like issues that are obvious in hindsight but may not have been obvious at the time. It's much easier to look at an existing, established codebase and point out all the flaws that it is to anticipate all the future challenges. In other words, you're monday-morning quarterbacking.

Maybe Notch didn't start building it with the idea that anyone would want to mod it. Heck, maybe he didn't even anticipate that it would be popular enough to require great performance. If he expected the game to be played primarily by him and a few friends then he could forego performance for beefier machines.

If he started out trying to build a game that would need to be extremely easy to mod and be performant on millions of machines of varying performance capabilities, he probably wouldn't have gotten around to actually writing it in the first place. It's called over-engineering, and it kills more projects than anything else, IMO.
The controversial opinion is that despite the 'shortage' (http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-i... don't increase their pay rates substantially and instead complain that there's no one to hire.
Yeah, sorry about that - should be back up now.
My Data Is Big Because It Doesn't Load Into R
Breckenridge: More Than a Ski Town
Breckenridge lodging is one of the draws to the snowy mountain town all on its own. Luxury rental properties are scattered throughout and surrounding Breckenridge. Summit County property management companies like Alpine Edge have offerings at every price point. Adventure seekers can choose Breckenridge vacation rentals outside of town near the ski action. There is more to Breckenridge, however, than winter sports. The introverted type can choose vacation rentals in Breckenridge proper that keep them close to the boutique shops, quaint coffee houses, and ice skating rink. A cozy condo can simply offer a quiet space to read a book fireside and watch the snow fall.
Yeah, I'd like one just to figure out how much I'm really sleeping and how much of that is deep sleep, etc.

Hardware-wise, it sounds a lot like the old Zeo Personal Sleep Manager. I was interested in getting one of those, but then the company went other and shutdown their API, bricking all their devices. I hope these guys don't make the same mistake.
I tend to cringe whenever someone invokes the 9th amendment, because it's always used to justify "rights" that whoever is invoking it completely made up. All the 9th amendment says is that the Bill of Rights is a non-exhaustive enumeration. Invoking it is appropriate when someone says: "there is no right to X because it's not in the Constitution." However, it does not help you bootstrap a right that isn't found in the common law, case law, or somewhere else.
Guardian staff could face terrorism charges for Edward Snowden leaks
In the second sentence of the kickstarter page it says "a new rocket propulsion system powered by the Sun and propelled by water". I think that is pretty clear.
I mentioned some in a response to a similar comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6842944
ASK: Is this a real banksy?
Show HN: People Food - $7 Office Lunches for Hungry Startups
Build a service that automatically applies to all of them, and charge millennials $125 for use.
Right. I suspect the post is mostly valid to "consumer" type companies.
The best F1 driver was Schumacher. The greatest F1 driver was Senna. My favourite is Jodie Sheckter. Greatest car is the McLaren MP44 - an unmitigated beast. Favourite car the Tyrell P34. Race commentary isn't the same without Murray Walker. One of my greatest moments was watching Keke Rosberg do a 360 and keep going[1]. That was at the US GP in 1983, when I was 13 and thought those drivers walked on water.

F1 is not what is once was - the romance is gone. Vettel? He's a n00b that does it for the money.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMHi8JUBMG8
Why make it an either/or argument? I didn't suggest making an Android app. A mobile-responsive web site would work great for both iPhone an Android. And desktop.

That article doesn't really apply here - it's discussing in-app advertising, app purchase fees and in-app purchases. I hope for Luna's sake that they aren't going to charge that $6.99 delivery charge as an in-app purchase, because they'll lose 30% instantly.
As soon as you guys are in NYC! :)
Notch is a very bad programmer

I despise this sort of single-dimension haughty evaluation of programming "goodness": It is garbage, and is the dismissive grenades that a particular type of maintenance programmer tosses to feel better about themselves as they try to feed the family with sloppy seconds.

I single out maintenance programmers because there is a stark difference between creating something out of nothing, and being the guy who looks at that something and -- with all that is laid in stone in front of you, all of those unknown lands revealed and detours and dead-ends made evident -- can say "Oh clearly you should have A->E->Z: What a dummy!".

All novel works can be improved in countless ways, iteratively. This is a given of software development, and the fear of having to go through this inevitable process has stopped most projects before they've ever begun.

"His failures have tangible reprecussions that have long plagued the Minecraft hacking community and Mojang itself."

There is so much irony in this statement. Do you even realize?
> Lately I've realized that having pristine, elegant code is NOT the goal. The goal is to ship software that people actually use.

It depends on the use case and business model of your software.

If you want to ship a single version of something then don't worry about code quality. If you're market testing and will get resources for a rewrite if the product takes off then again speed to market is more important than code shape.

But if you want to enhance the software or tune its performance then you need good code structure.
What if the traditional service starts performing the same service, rendering the proxy a meaningless middleman?

I applaud these guys for recognising a gap in the market, but it seems quite risky to me.
Another option is to use direnv (http://direnv.net).

Just add this to your .envrc in your project's folder:

PATH_add bin
GOPATH="$PWD"

The environment is automatically loaded or unloaded whenever you enter or leave the directory.

EDIT: Disclaimer, I'm the main author of direnv
It's not attacking a person to ask them to back up their qualifications to judge.
Guardian: We have published 1 pct of Snowden leak
Key-Value Observing Considered Harmful
Best of luck to the SpaceX team! Hopefully they got everything fixed!
I wrote to the author and this has now been reworded: "pigs, dogs and other similarly sized animals would have to eat about 500 of the baited mice to get a lethal dose".
Ask HN: Looking for a sales engineering job
Hi,

I'm a software developer who is looking to transition into the role of a sales engineer and am wondering if anyone is hiring.
I live in an EU country(one of the slavic ones; unfortunately I can't disclose more) and am speaking English fluently. Apart from that, I also know some rudimentary German.

I have 3 years of experience in developing financial software, specifically I am making upgrades on an existing stock trading platform and have developed a data mining web application, which heavily uses machine learning methods, from scratch by myself (making me a full stack dev, I guess).
Apart from technical expertise, during the past three years I have also obtained deep and comprehensive domain knowledge of how brokerage firms operate. Everything from their internal processes to their interaction with the stock markets.

Due to ongoing engagements, I can't start before April. So if anyone is interested, please let me know in the comments.
First, Scala is not C++. Second, you need good discipline in those simple languages, as well. I've seen too much terrible Java code to believe Java simplicity saves you from being disciplined.
> I guess someday when you're an old man, right before you close your eyes for the last time, you can imagine all that cool code that you wrote, and say what a great life you had. You were a hacker.

I'm also a researcher, and I like to think that the ideas I discover will outlast me and will make a difference.

Your implication is that those who think of software as a 'product' to be sold are making a difference, and those who think of creating software as its own reward are not. Maybe you are right. I just wish there was a place for those of us who appreciate the craft to hang out. Hacker News, for a long time, was that place for me.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/
Barricelli - a Genetic Algorithms Computer
The thing that I liked about this article, from the point of view of hacker interests, almost as much as the article's headline conclusion is how the dataset was gathered and compiled to do the study. I especially like that the researchers have open-sourced the data set and built procedures so that other researchers can improve the data set over time. This is the twenty-first-century approach to science: broad international collaboration, and lots of data-sharing.
What sounds suspicious here is that diamond rings are not particularly good as the performance bond. Sale value of the ring usually much less than the purchase price (which means the woman loses part of the value that the man is willing to commit) and this sum is much smaller than the price of rearing a child alone and even the price of the marriage prospects destroyed. Of course, the woman may refuse to accept anything but a super-expensive ring but in reality the rings that get accepted are not that expensive, compared to the value that it is purported to be the bond for. It can not really be otherwise - if it is too expensive for an average person, it can not become a tradition among these people.

So this theory, while it looks plausible, does not seem to properly explain the rings, unless I am very wrong about the prices in play - are there any data about it?
I'm hoping that one day, Minecraft gets completely open source and is ported away from Java. I've tried and failed to write a plugin for Bukkit and the whole ecosystem is horrible. When your modding toolkit involves importing craptons of JARs and decompiling the rest, something's really wrong.
Right, but it's not uninstallable on many newer devices which also have the proper Android browser too, so these figures will be way off.
Yeah, in NYC this is a major pain point. If I am not home to receive a package, I have to pick it up at the local post office, which has the following properties:

0) Often loses packages (~25% of the time)

1) Does not re-attempt delivery under any circumstances

2) Is unbelievably crowded by customers who are enraged by 3)

3) Staffed by people who do not care about their jobs at all

4) Has a minimum wait of 30 minutes to get your package

Is 30 minutes of my time plus transit to and fro worth more than seven bucks? Probably yes.
This is interesting, but the post title is inaccurate. This is a new way of doing dynamic modeling of snow, put together by a group of researchers, most of which are affiliated with Disney. Perhaps this model -- or something based on it -- might be used in a CG movie someday. Perhaps such a movie might be made by someone other than Disney.
I snubbed the idea until I realized the obvious acquisition target is Amazon. How long are you estimating until they offer? After the NYC rollout?
I think this is a little bit of a trap. Sure the number of people on the service are a feature and almost a meta-feature since it usually enables or multiplies the fun of other features. However the real value is number of active people on the service (which you did write). Those people were enchanted before I, as a new user, showed up. Therefore there is some orthogonal benchmark of quality or delight is required. These features I believe are what make someone get excited and share your app which then makes it amazingly social and draw in "the good people"
Can the UK use the excuse that English is a difficult language to learn? (Ignoring the fact that Australia ranks higher than the UK)

English feels difficult to learn, and part of that is the vast amount of language we get from other countries. Does Japanese have that problem? I know that they have Pan for bread which they got from Portuguese, but do they have as many imports as English?
Reverse Turing Test
Have you read Stephen Levy's Hackers? I'm not sure Instagram would even exist without the pioneering programmers who started out on model trains...
Would something like this be able to work within the atmosphere?
You reaply have no way of knowing this is how it happened for this guy. Id even hazard a guess and say he ran out of his savings cushion and then ran out of credit, cause like, thats what he said in the first 6 words.

I dont know what your trying to add to this conversation but its not helping anyone that reads these forums.
This library supports that if your static row is the header (uses th tags).
This isn't really a "censorship resistance" tool as it is a steganography tool. You can still be censored if your internet access is cut, or you have no way to publish your message.
I have to agree. I used to be a huge Pavlina fan for the personal development and productivity stuff, but over the years got really turned off by all the posts about law of attraction and solipsism (though he disputed that's what he was going on about).
[can't edit previous post]

In fact replacing the nopw that is used for alignment by a prefetch instruction gives me something slightly even faster:

00000000004004e0 <prefetchit>:
4004e0: 31 c0 xor %eax,%eax
4004e2: 0f 18 0d 87 04 20 00 prefetcht0 0x200487(%rip) # 600970 <counter>
4004e9: 48 8b 15 80 04 20 00 mov 0x200480(%rip),%rdx # 600970 <counter>
4004f0: 48 01 c2 add %rax,%rdx
4004f3: 48 83 c0 01 add $0x1,%rax
4004f7: 48 3d 00 84 d7 17 cmp $0x17d78400,%rax
4004fd: 48 89 15 6c 04 20 00 mov %rdx,0x20046c(%rip) # 600970 <counter>
400504: 75 dc jne 4004e2 <prefetchit+0x2>
400506: f3 c3 repz retq
400508: 0f 1f 84 00 00 00 00 nopl 0x0(%rax,%rax,1)
40050f: 00

2,445,505,116 cycles # 0.000 GHz ( +- 0.52% )
2,800,857,971 instructions # 1.15 insns per cycle ( +- 0.00% )

0.643010038 seconds time elapsed
I am going to port this to ruby. I'm currently unemployed and it should be a good sample to share with potential employers.
Even the de Villota death was a huge huge fluke. She lost control of the car outside of the track (no idea why she was driving outside of the track) and hit a moving trucks lift face first. If she had just ran into a wall on the track there is basically no chance she would have died.
Somehow I forgot to mention Elon Musk's Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/elonmusk. Always a good read.
How would it be difficult to reason? You know you're never off by more than a factor of 2 (or whatever factor is used), just like with an ArrayList.
> unfortunately many good domains are squatted

This might be partially my fault - I also got bitrator.com and bitrater.com before settling on bitrated :)
So wouldn't this build up a charge over time if its giving off electrons or am I misunderstanding?
Some of the best client service advice I was given was along this vein. "If you want the client to trust you, do everything they give you a little better and a little faster than they expect. They will trust you with more work, and eventually will trust your advice."
This is a cool service for urban areas, but I wonder if it's really true that UPS or FedEx wouldn't just do this if it became popular. For example, I recently discovered that with FedEx you can now schedule a delivery for 5-8PM for $5, and often UPS will deliver things during the evening, I assume because people are more likely to be home then.
If that's true, that makes the price-point more manageable.
>especially where modding is involved

The modding API consists of decompiling the entire thing and monkey-patching it. Does anyone else see a problem with that?

It's such a fantastic game but it's really unfortunate.
Wait you seriously are blaming liberals here? Hey why not i guess...?
They're solving an issue that's been slowly building over the last 10 or so years. I love online shopping, but the fatal flaw has always been the delivery process, which is heavily geared towards those who work at home, or have a partner/family member available in the house during the day.

Most of the time I get stuff delivered to work, but quite often we get angry emails from postroom staff who are swamped with packages and can't determine what's "business critical" post and just people ordering personal items off the web. I can sympathise with that a bit.
Substringing every word in a block of text is actually the ideal situation for the change here...
>men should be the ones primarily pushing baby carriages because //

Use a baby-sling. They use far less resources to make, far far less. They can aid the child in learning to talk quicker (face-to-face position). They're easy to take anywhere you can walk. They pack down almost to pocket-size. [Though no-one ever held a door open for me like they do for pram/stroller users].

Both our boys imitated carrying children in slings. They also both loved playing with toy push-chairs when they were available to them but they did so in a distinctly different manner to other kids, they never bothered with having "passengers" on theirs.

Soon after birth or a caesarean a woman should be resting, not pushing a buggy around just as anyone should be resting after a massive pelvic dislocation or abdominal surgery.
In a word: no. It generates a very minute amount of thrust. That's ok in the freefall of space because acceleration running 24/7 adds up fairly quickly. But these thrusters won't have a thrust to weight ratio higher than 1 so they can't feasibly be used for in atmospheric flight.
That's a very fascinating breakdown, and it's sort of a sad testament to American society and attitudes towards mental healthcare that case (c) might actually be a legitimate way to provide counseling to people who otherwise would not have sought it out. And perhaps it's cheaper, too.