skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is not a big expensive struct (to memcpy). (edit: I'm just bickering about what to call things, what you say is right.)

Your intuition about the performance of this sort of thing might be served by reading about how calling conventions work. You might not need to copy the struct from a local variable to where it belongs on the stack or in registers when calling a function, either because the calling convention says you put a pointer to the struct somewhere (depending on its size) or because you're (you being a compiler) clever enough to put it in the place that'll end up in the argument list later. The callee, however, has less flexibility, and if it needs to pass the value somewhere else, it'll probably have to copy the data. This is way better than allocating it on the heap -- stuff on the stack is in the L1 cache, you compute it's location statically instead of having to traverse data structures, but yeah if you found yourself copying around a 1000-byte struct you might want to box it or pass it by reference. I only know about C and C++ calling conventions though, so don't infer from my comment that Rust isn't doing anything "special" for big non-copyable structs -- I wouldn't know.
OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 launches just in time for new MacBook release
How the Slave Trade Shaped Cultural Arts in Brazil and the United States
Ah, that makes more sense. I admittedly read and responded to his initial comment before RTFA. I can see where that might be considered slightly ironic (while simultaneously terrifying that anyone would ever describe mass firings as "heroic").
Yes, it's a pretty big step down in functionality from Aperture. It's basically 80% iPhoto, 20% Aperture.
If you're looking to find out what it is and what's in it, there are some very flexible unpackers out there. Titanium Core from Reversing Labs is excellent.
Linus has a family, and so pictures etc. So he should care. ;)
Love comrad.es . Nice catch.
Not to attack or defend apple or the author but he just seems like a free spirit, and from personal experience in customer support myself (also quit twice) this is just not the job for a person who travels the world that much...
In large companies, customer support is a cost center. This can invert in SMB scenarios.
Yep, agreed. That would be awesome.
msys2 is a lot better than mingw+msys and cygwin, in my opinion. I switched months ago and its been a lot easier to deal with.
I am deeply concerned about the increasing quantity and intrusiveness of ads.

Not simply because I find them unpleasant or obtrusive, or that others do. Rather I am convinced that they are a "coal mine canary" that is warning us of impending economic collapse.

A few days ago, via HN I found a chart of advertising spend as a proportion of the GDP since the 1920s or so. It is just about always 2%. So if the economy is booming, then advertising will boom in a sense, but at no more than 2% of the economy.

The problem we've got is that it is very easy to make a new website, and it is not hard at all to attract people to it, however it is quite difficult to come up with ways to monetize a website other than by publishing ads.

Consider eCommerce - you need warehouses, people to ship the product, you have to deal with charging credit cards and so on.

But sites like mine, I just publish lots of articles and essays. When I first tried adsense, within just a couple of hours I could tell that I would earn three grand that month. Signing up for adsense then implementing it in my website was quite a lot easier than it would have been to monetize my site by selling a physical product.

Key to my concern is that the number of websites is growing far faster than either the GDP or the population. So there is less and less advertising money to go around.

The typical response is to try harder to convince visitors to your site to click your ads. Hence we have what I first complained about - "Like us on Facebook" before I can even find out whether I actually do like the content.

Eventually this house of cards is going to break down, in my specific case I have installed Privacy Badger and noscript, and I also blackhole analytics servers in my hosts file: "127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com".

In many respects a good solution is to operate a website just like my own: I don't use it to earn money. I earn money by working as a coder, however my site helps me to promote myself.

But there are many sites with very sizeable costs. Look how much it costs to serve Facebook.
High pressure describes an environment that can exist anywhere, independent of the decisions to make it that way. I like to listen to a famous controller at JFK. I detect no pressure in his voice. Every line of work has a share of high pressure environments. There are likely many people who could say "You want high pressure, try teaching pre-school!"
Brazilian Startup ZeroPaper Reaps Rewards from Scrimping and Saving
Percentages are not amounts. He said it does not have that much cattle.
While I don't agree with many of the comments here, I agree with yours specifically. I really hate the phrase human resource, like it is something that is ready for exploitation.
One of the many reasons I never worked for big consulting companies is that, they look at things as problems vs resources. If the problems cannot be solved by X resources, try X+1. There they are called resources, not even human resources.
If you decide to do anything with expirify.com please tell use / me!
Once-In-a-3B-year Statistical Move – Jamie Dimon on the US Bond Market
Unix Philosophy and the Internet of Things = Best Friends?
There is some more subtlety to this too. Apple's products (like most tech companies) are made by contract manufacturers, primarily Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry). What Apple does different is to buy the equipment Foxconn needs to make the products. This means there is no financial risk in that equipment to Foxconn, and that Foxconn's other customers don't get to take advantage of the equipment.

I highly recommend following http://www.asymco.com/ where Horace Deidu does lots of analysis on the industry, with focus on Apple. Heck he can fairly accurately predict future Apple sales because of the capital expenditures mentioned in the previous paragraph http://www.asymco.com/2015/02/10/how-many-ios-devices-didwil...
I can't imagine NZ are suffering from a drought. A few years back, I visited my brother in Auckland in a time when we had water restrictions at home (in South Australia).

Water was cheap there and in no danger of running short, so I got the impression that there was as much as you wanted to pay for. Which meant he'd often relax by standing in the shower drinking a beer.

Back home, councils were handing out water-saving shower heads, people could only water their gardens on alternating days, emptying dams made the news, etc.
Startup Incorporation Checklist
http://www.cnet.com/products/samsung-sch-i730-verizon-wirele...

2005, 2 years before the iphone. And even called a smartphone in the review.

Touch screen keyboardless iphone clone, no. But smartphone, yes. Apple didn't invent this category, they just changed it.
Zynga shares dropped 10% on this news.
You know you're going through hard times when your future business plan involves bringing back Mark Pincus. This guy is the cancer of the business world. The shady tactics that Mark used to get Zynga to the stage where it was once at the top of the gaming world before it crashed and burned would make even the most rogue leaders blush.
Vintage Electronics – The Tefifon
I'd say that your ability to write Java source in any text editor at all was, all by itself, a new method of doing Object-Oriented Programming.

We used Visual Smalltalk Enterprise. It had the cool feature that, at the end of the workday, I could make what amounted to a core dump, then the following morning I would load my core dump into a running program, and there would be all my open windows with the cursors in the right places in the source documents and so on.

That was quite cool I really enjoyed it, however that environment was profoundly non-portable. I expect that much of the success of Java as opposed to Smalltalk was the simple ability one had to post a tarball full of source code on one's FTP site.
There are many ways to combat churn. My point was that doing what is right to make the customer happy can be an awesomely powerful and more importantly POSITIVE weapon in the battle against churn.

Platform lock-in is a negative, customer-hostile approach. The positive alternate version of "lock-in" is "stickiness." Ie. the concept that your product/service/experience is so amazingly awesome that your customers have many reasons to keep coming back and using you.

Platform lock-in has always come across to me as a crutch for some flaw in a product/service/pricing model. I understand businesses need to manage risk and their investment in customer acquisition, but focusing on customer-positive ways to do so seems better aligned with all parties interests, no?
Nope. Unless there is a contract in place, it is fine in "at-will" jurisdictions.
I was not witness to that "used to see a bright future" ... I have been worried about the machines replacing us for some time myself.

Not because I'm worried about being bored, but because I'm worried about who controls the finite resources.

>>>> We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.

Darwin among the machines in 1863
I agree, I have had my Pebble for a year and it works perfectly. Tells me when I get an e-mail or text message. I also keep my phone on silent all the time since I can get the notifications directly and can decide if I need to reply or if I can ignore it for later. I can also check my stocks and there are tons of apps on the pebble appstore.

The battery life is also very nice and lasts a full week.

The SDK is also pretty nice, I've made some simple apps with it.
... except for the fact you can't really compare the two at all. Disk space alone doesn't warrant a comparison. iCloud has native access to photo storage, Google Drive does not. Apple will deal with the entire backup process from the device up to their cloud without running another app in the background. Google Drive cannot do this.

Selling products and services is a lot like real estate, it's sometimes about location, location, location. Google Drive just doesn't compare.
NASA: We'll find alien microbial life in 10 to 20 years
The percentage is important.

I don't live in California, but lets assume that the percentage of American beef that California produces matches up with the percentage of the beef I eat that is from California. I think that is more than generous.

So 5.7% of the beef I eat is Californian. The majority of the rest is raised in areas with their own independent water supplies.

Let's assume that the percentage of almonds that are from California matches up with the percentage of the world's almonds that are Californian. This is more than generous, as I wager exceptionally few of the almonds that I eat are imported, since the US exports almonds...

So 80% of the almonds that I eat are Californian.

If you want to defend almond-eating and condemn my beef-eating, those statistics are going to be a problem for you.

California could completely ban all cows within California and ban the export of Alfalfa for all I care. The price increase would not particularly bother me. If California halted production of almonds, I don't think almond-eaters would be very happy at all. For the record, I would support California doing both.
"fundamentally unreliable"

I don't know if I buy that. But I do agree with you that Apple needs to improve its file system offerings.
Thanks for the feedback. There is a PR for S3 support, but it's dormant because it was mixed with other changes that broke compatibility. I haven't personally wanted S3, so haven't made time to rework the PR.
i haven't had a case on my iPhone in 6 years. the screens do not in fact break easily. some people are more clumsy than others. some just prefer to have a case for whatever reason. the same is true for android phones.
Wow cool checklist for Startup Incorporation! Thanks
I don't care that much about the "cloud" stuff -- I already pay for unlimited online backups -- but it looks like Photos will finally do lens correction. Yay! Now I can finally shoot raw without messing with Lightroom.
Righto. So what is the equivalent thing with git-annex? Would I have to essentially do two commits, one for source code and one for large objects?
These numbers are provably wrong, not to mention comparing apples and oranges. At the very least their "3,000 and 5,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef." is completely disproven from their own source[1]. Waterfootprint.org gives 1,847 gal/lb. If we compute the numbers ourselves, we get very different numbers:

Butter......... 4.89 cal/gal = 3,252 cal/lb / 665 gal/lb
Cheese......... 4.75 cal/gal = 1,808 cal/lb / 381 gal/lb
Milk........... 2.27 cal/gal = 276.7 cal/lb / 122 gal/lb
Chicken........ 1.92 cal/gal = 993.4 cal/lb / 518 gal/lb
Almonds........ 1.35 cal/gal = 2,608 cal/lb / 1,929 gal/lb
Almonds Milk*.. (See Almonds)
Ground Beef.... 0.81 cal/gal = 1,506 cal/lb / 1,847 gal/lb
Almond Milk

* Almond Milk is basically almonds + water, but the added water is eclipsed by the almond water.

We see here, almonds aren't 10x more efficient, but closer to 2/3 more efficient, and of course cow milk is 2/3 more efficient than almond milk.

Further,

More than half the entire US water supply goes to livestock

Water going to livestock is a misrepresentation since not all of it goes to produce meat, but in fact goes to produce milk, butter or cheese. I will admit though that the numbers above look slightly suspect. How/why would butter be more efficient?

Lastly, it completely (perhaps ignorantly again) misrepresents other meats with the following 2 easily disproven quotes:

Meat processing, especially chicken,
also uses large amounts of water

and...

The more plant-based foods we eat versus
animal-based foods….the less water, energy,
and other natural resources we use

This is clearly false from the numbers above where chicken is actually 42% more efficient than almonds(!), which of course completely validates the anti-almond press and invalidates this entire blog post.

[1] http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/productgallery where beef is listed at "15415 litre/kg"
There were so many smartphones before the iPhone, the main thing that Apple added was touch, which allowed them to have full screens. Not like it wasn't going that way anyway, LG prototyped a phone like that a year before the iphone came out.
There are quite a lot of studies that examine the difference between 'crunch mode' and 40hr type weeks. I've read that crunch beyond about 3 weeks results in less work being done per week than a 40hr week, and two months of crunch mode results in being behind where two months of 5day/40hr weeks would have got you. It also increases the risk of product failure.

Basically, if you believe that hitting a deadline is worth having overall less productivity for, you can reasonably crunch for 2 weeks, and have the third week as an acknowledged low productivity week, and it might be worth it. Anything much beyond that is counter-productive on pretty much all axes and a strong sign that management is incompetent.
I disagree.
You are using your company as a counter example to all other companies, and you admit that in your last sentence. I am glad your company treats your people right, and it bodes well for your EVERYTHING.

I have worked at a dozen or so support jobs, and no matter how much the customers stayed because of the support team or how much we drove the value our clients got out of the product, we always were a cost center and treated as such.

That always meant they we got the second best of everything, were always last on the list for raises, promotions, new hardware, proper chairs, whatever. We were left out of planning, and whenever another department decided at the last minute it wasnt their job now became ours to complete forever.

The second I switched over to being a consultant and making money for people instead of helping to avoid lost revenue, their attitude changed towards me and became much more positive and friendly instead of unreasonable and demanding (both on management and customer side).

I dont even know if this is a conscious or unconscious decision, but support/helpdesk job position is reviled for a reason, and the reason is that it is an unforgiving job with little acknowledgement, pay, or chance for promotion.

It gets even worse if you are doing stuff like Apple support (I trained iphone/ipod then ios/cpu at a vendor site) and almost everything he said rang true about them specifically (and the call center management world in general.)

Apple's training team was pretty cool and one of the few saving graces, I am glad I got to hang with them in Austin, they definitely were trying to build a robust system to train people with reproducible results. It was the best training I had gotten from any corporation before or since, it was what got me into training in the first place.
Further zen can be achieved by aliasing `e` to `subl`.
Isn't the usual refrain "the idea is useless, it's the execution that matters"? Or does that only apply when it's a startup and not a big evil company?
> All management is performed remotely

Wow, I've been out of the Windows world for years, can you really fully manage a Windows box without the GUI?
I think we'll see gradual transition on a few fronts, especially if substitutes improve and meat rises in price. More and more people won't be vego, but will have smaller meat components to regular meals, or go meat-free 1-2 dinners/week, etc.
Tens of millions of users have been using HFS for decades mostly with zero issues. I personally have used a Mac since the Mac+ and not one had corruption due to the filesystem. I would describe it as battle hardened for sure.
Unfortunately, it's not even close to being a good replacement for Aperture.

As far as seamless backup, a local-network Time Machine drive, plus Backblaze cloud service, is a very easy and cost-effective way to get both superfast local backup and off-site backup. And, after a very small amount of setup, it "just works" without any specific workflow.
More in the vein of Scott Aaronson about complex numbers "emerging"

http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.1267

http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.4084
> This is the Prisoner's Dilemma, plain and simple.

It's not really, but that is an enlightening comparison. Using the prisoner's dilemma as an analogy for this hiring situation, the employees aren't players (prisoners, if you prefer) at all. Which is exactly the problem.
Why isn't Google sharing this numbers?
I am developing the first colaborative crawler that's creating the only crowd-sourced database of Android apps data.

Let me know if you have any questions, I will be glad to answer.

The whole project is open-source, so is the data that's being pulled from the Play Store.

Here's the link to the project : https://github.com/MarcelloLins/GooglePlayAppsCrawler
the original assertion that customer service is somehow a cost center is prima facie false, since there are such things as services/consulting companies, and they are some of the largest.
Algorithms Will Make JPMorgan Less Bad
How does Aperture compare to Lightroom? (I've only ever used the latter.)
I've heard this argument before and with all respect, I don't buy it.

Can you provide any examples of industries where there is no opportunity to turn CS into a profit center vs. a cost center? Sure it might be very difficult to model and prove out the exact impact it has on the bottom line, but I'm not convinced there are any scenarios where pissing off your customers with a poor experience is better for business than making them feel loved and, well, supported. :)
Formal Theory of Creativity and Fun and Intrinsic Motivation (2010)
Food offered for the employer's convenience is non-taxable compensation.
Not all that surprising. That's what Apple's Unicode placeholder symbols look like. The alien is a kind of cute choice for "unknown emoji".

Would we prefer they looked like [01F 574] in a rectangle?
not safer, though with [bigger] gas turbine you can get something like this :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJARrc40imk

or with bigger propeller : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_UtPmb3Z-o (in the San Carlos museum btw)
The Netflix Watch
"Any more."

Sorry, couldn't help myself.
One has to wonder if this will lead to a more aggressive policy of preventing ad-blocking users from viewing content without paying up. Several streaming websites already require you to disable your ad-blocker before they will stream content, it seems likely that youtube will follow in suit once they have implemented this method to remove ads.
>we were usually home by 8 or 9 PM rather than midnight

pot calling kettle black much? Getting home at 8 or 9 sounds pretty awful to me. I get that midnight is worse, but I don't think I want to work at either place. They both sound terrible.
And yet again hundreds of millions of people trust their photos to be stored on FAT formatted memory cards.
PowerShell is far more usable than sh or even bash as a scripting language. It's more like perl or python were integrated into a nice little command processor, since you can use all the .net libs (though not without some irritating effort). The problem is the cmd host is garbage, the utilities aren't burned into people's brains like the unix ones are, and they have weird Windows specific issues, like not being able to fork off a subprocess.
It'd be cool to see native vim commands for browsing / email clients etc, not sure of the point behind adding it to a text editor. Seems like a good way to lose users to the real thing in a slow hurry.
> Windows doesn't support hotpatching, Linux does, it really is as simple as that. Linux has more people working on it than the Windows kernel does, and is just a more advanced kernel in general at this point.

Actually, hotpatching is easier on Linux because it has a technically inferior virtual memory subsystem to Windows.

The Windows kernel is technically superior in numerous areas: virtual memory, thread synchronization primitives, and I/O (specifically, overlapped I/O), just to name a few.
Not sure if "lightweight" counts when talking about a mainframe, but when first encountering Solaris zones they seemed equivalent to LPAR's in the mainframe world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_%28operating_system%29

There are a lot of things from the mainframe world that are being newly "discovered" that seem quite mundane to the greybeards...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_z#Comparison_to_othe...
Haha, well, lets see here...

~ $ coffeemachine --cup 3 | bellydb --format liquid