skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's worth knowing the fundamentals, even if you don't use them much. The law of leaky abstractions (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...) means that you will occasionally bump into a situation where knowing how the underlying layer works will mean you can solve a problem that someone else can't.
Yesterday I was debugging a device driver for LCD controller using an oscilloscope. Low level programming might not be the hot tech these days, but there are tens of thousands of people who are good at it, and many were born well after you started with computers. I would maintain that learning it is not that hard, for an average, good, working programmer.
I dont even have 5 friends.
In Hartford, can easily head to both New York City or Boston.
Actually, the article being older than his account would virtually guarantee that he missed it.

He was probably disingenuous when he said that it was a good post, though.
The hardest part is figuring out what to unlearn. Really, it's just the old "you want an open mind, but not so open it falls out" adage from a different point of view. You can't throw out everything... well, unless you really, truly are wrong about everything, but that's pretty much as hard as being right about everything.

As for how to figure out what to unlearn, well, the metric I've been running on lately is to look at who is making predictions, and then see who is wrong in the end. Some people are right through sheer luck, of course, and some people who end up wrong are "essentially right" and ended up being wrong for no other reason than sheer bad luck, but in general it's the most useful metric I've found. Applying it to a specific case is hard, but it's worth a try. Oh, and this is slow, but then, a fast metric for this sort of thing would be suspect anyhow (prone to instability).

It turns out that once you start looking around, a lot of people are wrong about a lot of things, even some things that are conventional wisdom. It's really astonishing how few people hold themselves or others accountable for their predictions.

(Also, I'm not saying this is the only useful metric... it's just the only one I can come close to even just summarizing in a quick post, though.)
Donw, I know, but it is a weak qualifier, sure by part count the thing is 50% reproducible, but my proportion almost none is e.g. the metal bars. Its kind of like saying that your desktop printer can reproduce itself by printing layers of paper that can be cut and glued together. I bet someone could do something, but it is unlikely.
ok, not quite as hard-core as to write my own assembler, but i grew-up with ZX-81's and C-64's, and like-wise: if you wanted speed, BASIC couldn't do it, and a C-compiler couldn't fit in the memory (IIRC, games writers cross-compiled any C on PC's).

And it's true: the best optimising compiler in the world cannot work out the intentions you had for your code -- sometimes choosing one type of algorithm will optimise quite differently from your intention -- and if you have even basic understanding of what's happening on the hardware, you're already ahead.

Funnily enough, in my last job I met someone who had the same sort of experiences, and understanding of the actual hardware, and we lamented that no-one was growing up these days understanding the low-level stuff, incl. bus dymnamics, interaction between I/O, memory and CPU, etc, etc.

Doubly interesting was in my current job, met someone who understood JVM byte-code as well as assembler, and he claimed it was key to understanding how to get truly great performance from Java.
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An understanding of how of your processor works is quite useful for any programmer, but I don't think learning machine code is worth the effort for most people.
"The conversion value is approaching zero" -- I think advertisers, some at least, have forgotten how advertising can work. They've been lead to believe by some that because they can track everyone's response to a campaign that it always makes sense to do so.

It's not likely that I'm going to see a banner advert on a page and immediately click on the link and respond to it. It interrupts whatever I'm actually doing - i.e. reading the content. But I might well remember having seen the advert later, and that might change my future plans.

(Here's an idea for free - make it easy for me to find the adverts I've already been shown. When I'm reading a physical newspaper or magazine I can flick back to the advert, or riffle through to find it again. Unless an advertiser is doing saturation advertising across an entire ad network one day, it's hard for me to do the same online.)
We have a Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) machine at my work, its better than a 3d printer and with larger capacity. Its pretty awesome.
Another crossfit hacker? Wow. (The first place I saw that article linked was from crossfit.com, around the time it first came out. )

I got good results with crossfit (dropped 40 pounds, now I'm "athletic" -- I'd never have imagined I could do 20 pullups before), but I'd do it even if it was only average, because it doesn't bore me.

Running? Unpleasant and boring. Weight lifting? Boring disciplinarian bullcrap ...

Crossfit? I check the website, burst out laughing, grit my teeth, and then do something that seems almost impossible yet takes 30 minutes or less. Awesome.
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Assembly language yes, machine coding as in flipping switches on the front panel is probably going too far. I suppose you dont really need to know how a cpu works to be a journeyman programmer, but I think to be truly innovative you need to know what lies at the heart of it all. If you know instructions, registers, L1 and L2 cache then you can muse about interesting and innovative problems. How can you think about really fast algorithms if you dont know about cache latency? How can you think about distributed functionality in a robot, if you dont know that everything goes through a single pipe in a processor? (OK a small number of pipes.) I know some kids who parleyed their knowledge of the difference between the latency of instructions in cache and those in memory into a significant company.

Some friends and I are going to start an old programmers' home, like the old sailors homes. Obviously we should include you as a charter member.
At least this scheme isn't as susceptible to systemic risk as the mortgage one that caused the recent crash. Unless a lot of people unexpectedly die of Swine flu, volcanoes or earthquakes of course...
Hmm, is this going to be a dick measuring contest or are you actually interested ?

If it's the latter, email me.
There is nothing wrong with a hedge fund buying these things speculatively and allowing for a more fluid transfer of risk. Hedge funds exist to make a market for these kind of exotic securities, greasing the wheels of the risk markets.

Buying a securitized version of these is very foolish for the pension funds. Securitization does not remove risks, it simply hides them in ways that pension fund managers are ill equipped to understand. Furthermore, these assets are potentially highly correlated- the article gives the invention of new AIDS treatments as one example.

An in depth lecture on the math behind securitization (of subprime loans, but it applies to this as well) can be found at http://www.hbs.edu/economic-crisis/research/financial-report....
Seriously, I read this article and I wanted to puke.

Why isn't the NY Times writing articles asking, "Why aren't more Investment Banksters in jail?" instead of promoting the fact that "The Banksters have found one more way to steal your money, New life insurance backed securities!"

How is this hacker news?
Thus bookmarked. Reminds me of the day that I discovered a reference that allowed me to parse a hairy C declaration into English and to compose my intention into a hairy declaration. I carried the book around for years.
At some point in your career I think it's nice to sit down with Assembly just so you understand what's going on down there. But I don't think a programmer should do that until they have a rock solid understanding of modern day programming.

The reason I say that is because modern languages have abstracted most of the direct interaction away. So a preoccupation with what's happening at the assembly level can be more of a distraction if your language of choice isn't already second nature to you.
As a grad student in math, i would say that determination still plays a important role. For me, there have often been periods where you lose motivation and dont see why you are doing what you are doing, and then sometimes there are moments of clarity. (someone aptly compared this to mountain climbing). I imagine this happens in lots of other fields,(music, to pick a random example) where there is a prequisite of learning lots of arbitary things before understanding/creativity happens. Determination, is what you might need to to go through these phases.
Cory Doctorow has a very interesting story on this, Printcrime: http://craphound.com/?p=573
Cuban's advocating blocking links from aggregators. He may mention newser but the strategy would 'work' again HN as well.

This extremism seems silly - the sites could do click-through ads which generate revenue for any deep links, also a few lines code - and growing number of sites do this.
Frankly, I found this article a little insulting, and the comparison of the USA to Germany prior to the Nazi movement completely out of line. The fears the author voices may have been a real possibility 50 years ago, but the author makes a load of assumptions here, real leaps:

1. China and the U.S. will compete for resources 2. They'll compete in a brutal way 3. This will sour "Americans" against ALL Asians 4. Racism and genocide will result.

Give me a break. Well sure, and an asteroid might hit the planet tomorrow. It's possible, but it's entirely unlikely.
You mean Web 101.
While I wouldn't agree that programmers need to learn machine code, I would definitely recommend that they at least learn some ASM and poke around in a few programs with a decent disassembler.
Seeing and understanding how a program actually interacts with the hardware at runtime was one of the biggest moments in my life as a programmer. The first time I successfully "cracked" a shareware program, my understanding of how computers worked increased a hundredfold.

Before multi-core processors became common, I had a major argument with another senior developer at work who completely believed that simply adding threads would speed up execution of his functions (that's what threads do right?!).

Edit: The point is, programmers don't know nearly enough about how their programs interact with the hardware they run on.
Geoffrey of Monmouth (Wales != England) did not invent the Arthurian legend, he reinvented it. The Arthurian legend predates him & appears to have been based on a 'Roman' soldier who remained in the British Isles after the first Roman invasion:

184 - Lucius Artorius Castus, commander of a detachment of Sarmatian conscripts stationed in Britain, led his troops to Gaul to quell a rebellion. This is the first appearance of the name, Artorius, in history and some believe that this Roman military man is the original, or basis, for the Arthurian legend. The theory says that Castus' exploits in Gaul, at the head of a contingent of mounted troops, are the basis for later, similar traditions about "King Arthur," and, further, that the name "Artorius" became a title, or honorific, which was ascribed to a famous warrior in the fifth century.
A double 'Bingo' to the parent!

There's legal recourse against sites taking more than fair use. And fair use generates hits on your site. And if you can't monetize the hits on their site, well, you'll be replaced by someone who can.

Uh, and lot of the dying old media were just dumber parasites - a local newpaper twenty years was three lame local stories plus condensed AP and NYTimes feeds. I don't feel sorry to see that go...
The Story of Mel... An inspirational story of what true hacking is about.

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html
Every successful entrepreneur who has failed at least once should have his picture in the dictionary next to the word tenacity!
Will Oracle kill MySQL ? Why they Can’t and Why they Wouldn’t
I was being disingenuous as well when I decided to find a relevant link being sure that such a combination of elements must exist if the original poster referred to it...

Do not attribute to misunderstanding what can be attributed to malice ;)
Very excited about the ideas expressed in this article. There is a quite open hardware revolution that's about to tip.

The open source cheap tools mentioned are very readily available, http://bit.ly/LvFB9, and they're getting even cheaper by the second. Hacker spaces, http://bit.ly/DRTYB, are springing up everywhere so knowledge is definitely being passed down globally.

Its always bottom up innovation that manages to disrupt. Open Source software paved the way, I can't wait to see what Open Hardware will do. Very exciting indeed.
Cliff also gave a presentation at javaone about alternate languages on the jvm, in particular, Azul's. AFAIK only slides are available: http://www.azulsystems.com/events/javaone_2009/session/2009_...
I don't have this low-level background, but am increasingly coming to the conclusion that it matters a lot, and that the vision of high-level abstractions entirely divorced from hardware is a pipe dream. You can get away with it on easy problems but not hard ones.

Alan Kay says that people who are serious about software have to be serious about hardware.
He misses the point: the value of a news item is going down because of the advent of Internet and the rise of Internet journalists.

While they may not be of the caliber of a typical print journalist, that may be a supply-demand thing. Meaning if all newspapers blocked news aggregator, there is a high chance that there will be new folks producing newspaper-quality content who'd be happy to get the aggregator traffic.
Yes, my example is different. I'm using that difference to demonstrate that your argument fails.

You acknowledge that Joe doesn't owe you his touch on the basis that he isn't required to put out any effort to save you.

My point is that you're distinguishing between effort at different times. You think that should be able to benefit from work that he does before you have a need but not from work that he does after you find yourself in need. That's absurd.

Yes, I know that the mechanism by which Joe withholds his labor is different in the two cases. So what?

The whole "there's no marginal cost" argument is silly. We pay programmers more than ditch diggers even though it's clear that the latter work much harder than the former.

As to the "prudent" argument, pharma companies don't control IP law. The actual argument boils down to "they should have tried to molify righteous thugs". (Yup, I think that taking someone's labor is thuggery.)
that one should be required reading for any programmer.
I know some kids who parleyed their knowledge of the difference between the latency of instructions in cache and those in memory into a significant company.

That's interesting. Who? What? How?
If you know they're a good deal, why don't you use your superior investment knowledge to make money. Then you can buy a newspaper and have it say whatever you want!
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That will never happen. (I couldn't tell if you were being sarcastic or not.)
Death bonds aren't new.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_31/b4044001....
The simple answer: Yes. The longer answer: Yes, absolutely.

As for the why of it:

No other programming language will give you the feeling that it is you that controls the computer as good as assembly ever will, other than the lucky few that get to program microcode.

Assembler is what it all eventually boils down to, it gives you a first hand view at the von Neumann bottleneck and how small the letterbox is through which the CPU views the memory.

After you get a good long hard look at that your programs will never be the same.
In Boston here, been looking for a meetup for a while! we should organize one
Thanks sharpn. I'll have to read a bit more history... thanks for the leads.

To not let my lack of knowledge take away from the point of the comment - let me reiterate:

The point is not how Arthurian legends started. The point is King Henry VII got a hero from Thomas Malory's book. And this hero gave him the ambition to change England.
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In Cambridge/Central Square. Perhaps we can coordinate something on meetup for Boston. rcmorin [at] gmail
> What if the government laboratories did their research under the direction of private business?

How about not?

If you're worried about dumb spending by govt, this won't solve it.

If the likely value is too low for a company that would get all of the benefit, it's certainly too low for a govt that gets less of the benefit.
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I think its like with smiling. It goes both ways.

If you're in a good mood - you'll smile more.
And if you are in a bad mood - but you make a conscious effort to smile - your mood will change to become better.

Good mood leads to smiling. And smiling leads to good mood. Its circular.

Similarly - rich friends will lead you to become richer. And once you're rich you'll make more wealthier friends. It goes both ways.
While I'm not too sure that understanding the CAFEBABE stuff is truly helpful for improving Java performance, I definitely agree its helpful to know what's going on in there.
Bytecode usually decompiles into very neat code since the mapping between the code and bytecode is very tight with most optimisations taking place in the JVM.
I'm in New York! Search google for hacker news meetup nyc. We usually meet once a month!

Edit: not easy to find like that. http://groups.google.com/group/nyyc
Hey Josh, I'm in NYC working on a startup and would be interested in talking to you. Feel free to hit me up at jason at awwthor.com
I wouldn't of asked if I wasn't interested. Can't e-mail you if you don't make your e-mail address public.
Hi ivan. Drop me a note if you're interested in mobile startups. We use a hybrid of back-end "cloud" services for the back-end: GAE (Python), Amazon SQS for message routing, and another server for push messaging (PHP). If you're curious, write to us: ryan [at] sayhiapp.com
How would this be "one more way to steal your money"? Seems like a perfectly legitimate investment to me.
Agreed.
There are a few groups around who still keep this kind of spirit alive. Seeing what the guys in the demoscene can to with 64k is truly amazing, but what they do with 4k can blow your mind.
The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return

Well, now, that's a healthy, non-perverse set of incentives. :)
Engergy: exercise! Discipline:	honed by time's bitter lessons.

Ambition 1, multiplying with partners: jettisoned. Uh oh. Ambition 2, outlook: had it, then found the Buddha.

Fuck!
"Most consumers purchase wine depending on the attractiveness of the bottle's label. We hope to change this..."

Good luck. Changing the entire world's approach to something is quite ambitious.
For example, there was a case of an internship for working on a train. The company had the interns driving trains from one end of their yard to the other under close supervision. The moving of the trains was completely unnecessary and was just being done to train the potential employees.

It seems to me that this is a rather vague, academic argument.

Maybe the trains benefit from occasional movement in order to keep their mechanical systems lubricated, so that certain fluids and pressure chambers don't go flat, etc.

Obviously, I have no idea if that's true. I don't know a thing about trains or other mechanical systems.

The point is that if one wants to, one can probably make the claim - however tenuous - that just about any sort of 'kinetics' of supposedly "no value" to the company do, in fact, have some benefit.

Grooming potential future employees by having them do "useless" work can lower future recruitment costs and reduce risk. Isn't that "valuable?"
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Not necessarily; maybe it is that the conditions under which the work was performed (i.e. a low level of experience) brought negligible value to the organisation or entailed too high a risk or quality variance to be worth paying for, even if the actual kinetics are remunerable, in principle.
I get that you can collaborate outside of a web browser, but it's so much easier to build collaborative tools that run in a browser that I think that's where the action's going to be. Compare SubEthaEdit to every online document editor.
I believe you got the wrong conclusion from your story. They don't need to know low-level details because you do. Must they also understand payroll, marketing, sales, and floor-mopping just to work as a php programmer?
As one of the two founders from Kiko, I can say that we had ideas for how to sustain the company and try different routes, but instead decided to shutter and move on to something else (which turned out to be Justin.tv). I think that scenario is actually a perfect example of what PG is talking about: a startup that possibly could have made it by iterating, but instead gave up b/c the founders decided to move on. Competition may have caused the depression, but the founders themselves loaded the shotgun and pulled the trigger.
Also good is Ulrich Drepper's "What every programmer should know about memory". It talks about what happens at a very low level from the CPU registers and L1-3 caches to system memory and disk, and how the OS handles it all.

8-page series on lwn, with comments: http://lwn.net/Articles/250967/
[pdf] http://people.redhat.com/drepper/cpumemory.pdf
No, you don't have to know machine code to appreciate parsimony or performance.
So then, like me, you don't dispute that it's wrong to copy and distribute music from independent artists, especially when their licensing feeds fund their work directly. But you and I probably differ on how wrong it is to copy and redistribute major-label music.

I'm not stuck on the major-labels-are-evil stuff. I think they're evil too, but I also think if you want to have Gnarls Barkley on your iPod, you have to play Warner's game.

I'm curious where the slippery slope ends for you, though. Presumably, copying and republishing Girl Talk is clearly wrong. Copying and republishing Magnatune music is pretty wrong. Copying and republishing Matador albums is, what, a little wrong?
Like the Pirate Party, do you believe all noncommercial copying should be free? So, the only people who should pay for music are supermarkets and elevator operators?
Really simple object granularity ACL for Django
Those would actually be profitable events as these instruments pay more the sooner someone dies. A cure for cancer or similar medical breakthrough would be really bad news.

> "The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return — though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money."
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