skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rockstars blow their paychecks up their nose, cheat on their wives and girlfriends with groupies, trash hotel rooms then die young, or perhaps live to a ripe old age of poverty and destitution.

I have gotten to the point that when someone advertises for a rockstar, I don't even apply.

Do you know what a bozo filter is? Have a look at mine:

http://www.warplife.com/mdc/resume/

At the very top of every single page of my site are links to two essays about my - quite severe - mental illness, as well as the first chapter of a book about how engineers get people killed by screwing up on the job.

In the US, it's flatly illegal to discriminate against the mentally ill for reasons of employment. The specific reason I am a coder and not a physicist is that I write good code even when I am hallucinating.

If they get past that, then have a look at how a whole bunch of people really have been killed by clueless engineers - as when an incompetently designed truss bridge took the lives of one thousand steelworkers back in the day - perhaps they don't want to hire me because I would hold the entire company to the same standards I hold myself to.

I haven't always been that way. I've written a whole lot of code I'd rather that no one ever get to look at. I've written quite a lot of really stupid programs, just because we all knew they would sell really well.

But I'll be fifty-one years old soon.

I'm concerned about whether anyone will remember me after I'm gone.

They sure aren't going to remember that I did a stellar job writing the test tools for Apple's MacTCP.
As long as there is no war in any hot, desert countries, we should be right...
The other part of the story is that, in my experience, the workers who are being outsourced are typically given 2-3 months notice of their imminent termination. The 2-3 months is so that they can train their offshore replacement. Severance benefits are tied to staying - if they leave before the training period is done, they don't get anything.
LFENCEs of all things helped

I don't really understand what was happening here, but it was a definite positive effect. I think the issue is that the early preloads filled the queue, preventing the stores from happening. The bright side is that getting good performance on Haswell is easier, as it supports 2 loads and 1 store per cycle (although note that address generation is still a bottleneck unless you make sure that the store is using a "simple" address).

I've thought about designs of having one core do memory prefetching ahead of loosely synchronized other core doing actual computation

I'm interested in this approach too, but haven't really tried it out. "srean" suggested this also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8711626

I think it could would work well if you know your access patterns in advance, the hard part would be keeping the cores in sync. In the absence of real-time synchronization, you'd need a really high throughput queue to make this work. Interesting write up and links here: http://www.infoq.com/articles/High-Performance-Java-Inter-Th...
It's a much easier problem if you can batch up the preloads rather than doing them one at a time.

I have had success with a somewhat similar technique within a single core by issuing a batch of prefetches, then do processing on the previous data, then a batch of loads corresponding to the prefetches, then repeat. You can get 2-3x improvement of throughput on random access if you are able to tolerate the slightly increased latency. The key is figuring out how to keep the maximum number of requests in flight at all times.
Hmmm. A perfect opportunity to set out his vision- he's never going to get more attention for it than right this moment.

But he didn't take it at all. Virtually content free statement.
Researchers convert sunlight to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency
The U.S. Government Has a Secret System for Stalling Patents
Why was this published on the Washington Post? You'd think that the owner and publisher of a magazine and news website would want to publish his thoughts about the future of that publication on the publication.
Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed – The Real Reason for the 40hr Workweek
The question is would Spotify make money subscription revenue at $50 a month than $12. If the volume of subscribers at $12 is such to generate higher total subscription revenue then it makes sense to keep it low.

I think your point is pretty valid though, if I listen to 6 hours a day I am contributing way more towards band payouts than someone who listens to a few songs a day, even though I am putting in the same amount. The direct connection could actually encourage people to subscribe, have a page showing your contributions to each band you listen to.
Spoilers: http://www.g0hww.net/2014/03/decoding-pocorgtfo03pdf-with-mu...
I don't think I made it clear in my OP, my thesis is that there is a lack of process in both directions.

It's not just that I believe that employers can't find qualified staff, but that qualified staff cannot find jobs.

I have numerous theories as to the cause of this.

Among my proposed solutions is to set off huge long flamewars at the Hacker News. :-P
I'm loving it, and I'm sure it's led to many happy conversations like this one: https://identi.ca/joeyh/note/-715nLEDSr2lhx3ZNQO1vw
We don't support roaming yet, so phones from other carriers won't work on our networks. The networks are fully independent, with their own phone numbers and connectivity to the global phone network though.

Definitely get in touch if you'd like to talk more! Many of our customers live in places that sound like where you live.
John Foreman's book _Data Smart_ follows the Excel-first methodology, and I've been appreciating how well this separates the data analysis from the toolset choice.
Chaos Monkey is great, but it may be more pragmatic to start by injecting failures manually, rather than through an automated process. We do this with Failure Fridays at PagerDuty - https://blog.pagerduty.com/2013/11/failure-friday-at-pagerdu....
If we are part of a simulation, any and all kinds of afterlife are possible (although admittedly still improbable).
I know all about 2-D image processing but not about pattern recognition.

I've done some algorithmically complex stuff, like Live Picture, which was a combination vector/bitmap graphic editor, which enabled one to do prepress graphic work for magazines and product packaging, by compositing 200 MB bitmap graphics on a 32 MB 68040 Macintosh.

Unfortunately, Adobe's marketing people were far better than ours. Our program was far superior to Photoshop, but no one could figure out how to actually sell it.

Given that, could you use me?

I'd rather not relocate, but if I did relocate, Cambridge would be a top choice for me. I've been there a few times, and once lived in mid-coast Maine.
It enriches our lives though. While free goods cannot be measured in terms of GDP, it makes us all better off. It also brings that enrichment to a much wider audience than would be if it had a pay barrier.
Go's interfaces are great, but one of my annoyances is that you can't define an interface with values (methods only). Which makes little sense considering it works just fine with getters and setters. i.e:

type Blah interface { Var string }

wont work, but

type Blah interface { GetVar() string }

does. I'm sure theres a reason for this. Can someone shed some light?
Web-based, WYSIWYG, inline editor comparisons
I have always wondered why musicians don't have donate links on their site?
My first thought was that this was a silly question, that there is nothing magic about OpenMP, and that the throughput would be the same. But thinking more, this would be a good thing to benchmark.

The difference is that OpenMP will be using multiple processes instead of multiple threads. Since the bottleneck in this case is access to memory in common between the threads, and since different processes won't be sharing this memory, I think OpenMP would indeed have a 4x speedup on this problem on a 4 (physical) core machine if the runtime was long enough to offset the cost of launching the processes with OpenMP.

More generally, it would be worthwhile to benchmark the performance difference between multiple processes with created with fork() versus multiple threads pthread_create(). If there is no need to write to the same memory (as with a bootstrap) the shared-nothing process based approach is going to more likely to get a linear speedup and is usually easier to reason about.
"At the New Republic, I believe we owe it to ourselves and to this institution to aim to become a sustainable business and not position ourselves to rely on the largesse of an unpredictable few."

Except that Hughes is one of those few who is in a position to allow the New Republic to create quality journalism while remaining financially protected. In fact, that's just about all he brings to the table, since he doesn't have a background in journalism or running an organization like this.

If he wanted to grow a business, TNR feels like a strange project. Especially when it seems like journalists need the exact kind of protection that his wealth as an owner could've provided.
Schlieren Optics – Air Movement Demo
I've created Onarbor, https://onarbor.com, which is distinct from Patreon in that people actually publish on the platform instead of just linking to Youtube, whatever.

I think that's theoretical more powerful in terms of building a community on the site, but it is slow-going so far.
I'll add it to the page. Thanks!
Probably many reasons but primarily TNR's subscription base has been dropping for years as their wonky analysis has fallen out of favor, so what better way to increase interest/awareness but to advertise the new approach in WaPo who have 20x as many subscribers that are mostly Washington based?
For what it's worth, I found your original statement perfectly clear.
You'd still need to licence spectrum from OFCOM. No idea about that process.

I'm guessing you've had the same thoughts as me, but it looks like Vodafone and EE have had the same thoughts much sooner: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/03/cumbrian_village_get...

Still, it would be interesting to see how these could play out in villages that want to take control of their access to mobile comms.
I just got the 3.0 update on my phone and connected it to my Firefox account. Unfortunately, after the initial sync completes the app goes into a constant crash loop, making it unusable.

This is on an iPhone 5S running iOS 8.1.1, with about 200 bookmarks. If there are any crash logs I can provide, let me know.
Actually I strive constantly to learn new languages, toolsets, platforms, frameworks and protocols completely on my own.

But that doesn't help me get a job. No one has paid me to work with any of those, see.

If I can somehow get a job through some other means, then yes, all of my self-study is a huge help to me, to my coworkers and my clients.

What people actually ASK of me, when they think they're looking for "actual proven experience", is "how many years of experience" I have with a given technology.

No one EVER asks what I actually did with it, whether I shipped a product as a result, whether my code actually worked, whether it got good reviews, or sold well.

If I weren't such a nice guy, I know damn well I could totally fabricate my resume, and I'd have $250k and an office with a door I could shut in a heartbeat.

It would actually work really well, because you know - I do invest in my own training. So I really could do the work, even if my resume were fabricated.

But I'm a nice guy, so I don't fabricate my resume.
Exactly. Perhaps I lack imagination but I don't see what a periodical such as the New Republic really can or needs to do other than have their content online as print formats continue to decline in popularity. And after reading his statement, I had no better understanding of what his plans for a "sustainable" New Republic look like.
Is there an IRC channel I can hang out in for this project?
Julia Ioffe's take on things: https://www.facebook.com/julia.ioffe.9/posts/101003775093899...
An interesting question. Using [1], which note can't be executed on the Playground but you can execute by copying and pasting into a file "upgrade_test.go" in a new directory and executing

GOPATH=`pwd` go test -bench=.

I get:

BenchmarkInterfaceUpgrade 24.9 ns/op
BenchmarkDoNothingInterfaceCall 5.32 ns/op
BenchmarkInterfaceUpgradeAndCall 29.4 ns/op
BenchmarkInterfaceUpgradeFail 23.9 ns/op

For clarity, I've elided the "execution count" column which is not useful information for us here.

InterfaceUpgrade is testing the cost of having an interface-referenced value in hand and asking if it implements another interface. My belief based on the understanding of the runtime is that this is all a static check at runtime (i.e., taking the type of the value, looking that type's info up, and then reading from that type whether it implements a given interface, with all calculation done at compile time and only the lookup being done dynamically), and that while that number may go up a bit if there are more interfaces in play it shouldn't go up much.

DoNothingInterfaceCall is the time to call a function that does nothing and returns nothing through the interface. I tried adding a benchmark time for a do-nothing static call but Go inlines it away into nothing, making it a useless test of how fast the loop itself is running. 0.89 ns, FWIW.

InterfaceUpgradeAndCall combines the upgrade check and call into one pass. InterfaceUpgradeFail just checks to see if the fail case times very differently (no).

It's fairly easy to tweak these if you'd like to ask different questions. (Note some of the tests have a bit of spurious stuff at the end to make it so Go doesn't complain about unused values. Go really doesn't like to see unused values.)

Also, for those who may have spent some time benchmarking the more dynamic languages, I call your attention to the "ns" there. That's not milli- or microseconds, that's nanoseconds. (I once benchmarked something between Go and Erlang, and mistakingly though the Go was slower when it took 700 and Erlang was taking 70, but it turned out to be nanoseconds and microseconds respectively. FWIW, the code wasn't doing exactly the same thing, either, it was just some code I was benchmarking at the time, and it is expected that the Go code was doing less; point being, watch your units.)

http://play.golang.org/p/K1LedMxMPL
3-D Secure is the umbrella term for schemes like Verified by Visa, and yes, there has been a lot of criticism of both the added security (or not) and the disruption to the payment process and consequent hit on conversion rates.

The major advantage for merchants of using these schemes is that liability for various types of card fraud is shifted elsewhere, instead of the merchant getting dumped with the cost of fraudulent transactions even if they did nothing wrong except trust the payment services to do their job.

Much of this is likely to change again early next year, because there are SEPA-wide rules coming in that require strong authentication for Internet payments. Even the giant payment services can't ignore them, because liability for fraud on their networks is (finally) going to land on them whether they like it or not after the new rules take effect.
Quite true. I went to elementary through high school in an area where you saw people from a wide range of economic backgrounds. One thing that was a common feature of poorer students is they would show up for class less, take easier classes, rarely bring their book bags, and clustered together. They had the same opportunities as the more well off and could have made something of themselves, but they chose not to.

I was very poor as well, but parents had some foresight. I ended up in a mathematical biology phd program, one of the kids I used to ride the bus with shot two people in a robbery.
Probably for the same reason I don't as an open source developer: the donation model doesn't yield a lot of income. It's more worthwhile to put your resources towards developing other revenue streams.

Maybe donation links work for some, and of course creators should have the freedom to pursue that avenue, along with the freedom to pursue others.
You're arguing "What's good for consumers is bad for producers, so why are consumers doing it?". The answer is that consumers, in aggregate, don't care about producers. In general, people are self-interested. There is no contradiction here.

> when jobs go away (one of the direct results of the free culture).

This doesn't make any sense. If people are spending less money on one thing, they are spending more money on something else. If I pirate all my music, maybe I have an extra $100/year to go out to dinner, "creating jobs" (although I am loath to use that misleading phrase) in the culinary industry. In reality, of course, those $100 are spread across a whole bunch of areas of spending, but the aggregate effect is the same.
Or more scary (and tin-hat-y) how Google can effectively choose what does or does not "exist" on the net, by not making it show up in results.

It's already doing that via DMCA requests.
These people are crazy. Right up there with all those nutjobs that buy up huge amounts of land, plant useless weeds on it and then spend all summer going up and down the plot of land to rid it of the excess weeds like caveman. /s
Not mentioned are ES6's arrow functions that capture the `this` value of the enclosing context.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
I think apple does look out for its customers well. If they piss us off too much (and they ride that edge) we won't come back. We pay them.

Now who is paying facebook. While you might think the service is worth having ads targeted to you, its important to realize thats how the service is being paid for. Apple protects your name from book sellers, eMagazines and music companies.

That being said Apple is trying to sell us music and mobile ads though, which makes you say hmmm.
It was a somewhat rhetorical question on my part, and it speaks volumes about the reach and relevance of TNR.
I never understood this. Pointers just aren't that difficult if they're explained well.
It seems spotty. I think AWS is fritzy in the West Coast of the US right now.
I was refused a job at Amazon just two days ago, because I am mentally ill.

My website makes that plainly apparent. That's called "Voluntary Self-Identification" in the Americans with Disabilities Act.

I am dead certain that I am a far, far better coder than most of those who are already employed by Amazon.

While yes, Zuckerberg said that in 2007 I don't see any evidence that he's changed his attitude.

I never said that I myself ever applied to work at Facebook - and I never will. If I already know I won't like my place of work, I won't even apply.

However, I'm not the only fifty year-old coder who's looking for a job.

All that the UNITED STATES JUSTICE DEPARTMENT - not the applicant - would have to prove is that just one facebook employee turned down an applicant because he was forty or more years old.

Now are you going to tell me that that doesn't happen at facebook anymore?
This turned into a bit of a rant, but hopefully it does add something to the discussion.

You make some interesting points, but in my (limited) anecdotal experience, C is a pretty awful language.

Of all the languages I half-way know, I think I'm still least comfortable with C. Why not start out by teaching assembler? Especially post 32bit x86, assembler (intel syntax) is rather pleasant. It allows highlighting lots of things that are commonly hidden in C: calling conventions, different types of strings (eg: C vs Pascal) etc.

C is obviously very useful as a "real-world" language. If you need to add a driver you need to Linux, or patch a bug in your shell (or shell utility) etc -- knowing at least enough C to be dangerous can be very helpful. You'll likely be able to put C to good use re-implementing critical sections of python/ruby/whatever code. But IMNHO C still remains a rather awful language.

For some reason, I feel that pointers are easy in Pascal (and assembler) and hard to grasp in C -- as far as I can tell this is entirely a syntactical issue for me.

In the future (post rust 1.0), perhaps I'd recommend assembler, rust and some other high-level language (or two...). I find it hard to recommend Pascal -- while compilers exist, it is a little too much of a "teaching language" -- and a little too far on the outside of everything. Ada might be an interesting option.

Perhaps assembler > C > python. Or assembler > SBCL (Steel bank common lisp) -- because it integrates well with assembler, allowing the user to easily "peek under the covers".

C is awfully low level -- and yet also surprisingly high-level. There's no sane, canonical way to handle text (that is utf8/unicode -- not merely ascii). I'm not entirely sure C++ is much better in this regard, but I still think Storstroup's contrast between "beginner C" and "beginner C++" from 1998 is interesting[1]. I'd be curious what kind of production level code a beginning C programmer produces, and for what kind of problems.

Fundamentally though, I'm not sure there is a good "one way fits all". A lot of people will be served fine with only Python or Ruby (or Julia). Thinking too much about how the computer works can also be a hindrance, I think. Getting actual work done, does seem to hinge on joining together proven, useful tools. Be that tool Berkley DB, SQlite, Postgres, levledb, Riak, redis -- or text files (for example). Or protobuf or json or xml. Etc.

At any rate, I fail to see, from the point of "understanding how the computer works" -- it helps very much to learn (just) C. Without assembler, I think most of the useful lessons are lost -- and I'm not convinced the number of lesson most obvious in C -- but not covered by assembler on one end, and a high level language on the other -- are that many?

[1] http://www.stroustrup.com/new_learning.pdf
One thing Golang did that was really smart was to have a very slick documentation generator run from unformatted comments, using just a convention for how to write the prose. You have an incentive to write good comments (they're how you document your library to its users), and the comments godoc demands you write also work naturally as comments qua comments.

A lot of Golang is like this: very simple, almost trivial-seeming decisions that potently improve the language in practice. It's a fundamentally simple weapon, it's forged from Damascus steel.
Right, but then you wouldn't use imagemagick for the task anymore...
I'm ideologically against scientists profiting off their papers, because it's a poor incentive and harms us all, especially if they're already being funded by the public. I see absolutely no reason that a publicly funded scientist should expect to profit off the results or papers that come from publicly funded science. In short, you're not a creator that's free-lancing, you're a creator for hire, and the results don't belong to you - they belong to the financing body, which in that case, is the public at large.

A better solution is just to funnel money in to sciences through public funding mechanisms and telling you that the papers and results - free, and readily accessible to the public - are the deliverable we expect for that money.

Let me ask you this: why do you think you need to get money from the paper or results when as a scientist, you're already being paid for your work through other channels?
5 Major Lapses by Uber, Alleges Police
What a huge list! There are many new titles coming in 2015.
> Over a six-month period, Ms. Keating’s songs had been played on Pandora more than 1.5 million times; that earned her all of $1,652.74. She had 131,000 plays on Spotify in 2012. She took home $547.71, or less than half a penny per play.

People are making money, it's just not the artists

This has less to do with a "Culture of Free" and more to do with predatory business practices