skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When you call/jump through a vtable, you've already lost inlining opportunities. Indirect branches themselves aren't free either. This is an order of magnitude performance loss for simple functions. Additional order of magnitude worse, if the simple function behind vtable indirect jump/call was a vectorization opportunity.
> One of my coworkers fleshed out an important and complex component that absolutely had to be logically correct, by using TLA+ modelling.

This is nothing to do with you or your statement, but this is the pre-eminent issue in our industry. Everything absolutely has to be logically correct or we expose users to flaws in both security and stability that can in extreme cases be the difference between life or death and in regular cases be the difference between being cracked or not.
I think this shows that software product valuations really are variable.

People quote things like "2x revenue" all the way up to "15x revenue."

If these stats are correct, patio11 sold his for roughly 1.8x yearly revenue.

If revenue and margins stay stable, the new owner will recoup their investment in 3 years. This seems reasonable to me.
I was always inspired more by Jony Ive over Steve Jobs. In interviews he was always more real to me, more humble. A simple take away I've had from Johny (and steve to some extent) is to simply pay attention, to everything and anything. That kind of care and focus is how they get to be apple, versus good enough.

But will their products get better as a result of this? or will they continue to decline? Design has always taken more prominence at apple over usability (do they even have a Chief Usability Officer?) To some degree it's a tolerable tradeoff to make; but I've noticed their products have become significantly more design focused and well, pretty much everything else has taken back seat.

Perhaps there's TOO much design, and not enough of everything else. Maybe Steve was that balance to Jony and now the ying is yangless. Or maybe they're just optimizing their business for other things, and the things that matter to me are insignificant to them now.
Episode 33: The Asymco Trilogy with Horace Dediu Part 3 – The Asian Cars Edition
Community, Translation, and Wapuu: How Japan Is Shaping WordPress History
Synopsis: Horace Dediu, current fellow of the Clayton Christensen Institute and founder of Asymco.com joined us for an epic and insightful discussion focusing on few key interesting topics: (a) new market disruption theories, (b) Apple in China and the luxury market and (c) the Japanese automotive industry and how it shapes up against disruption from Tesla, Uber and Apple. In the last and final part of the trilogy, Horace discussed the Japanese automotive industry, and provided interesting insights into how Japanese car culture contrasts against the European and US counterparts. Using the innovator’s stopwatch framework, Horace explained the challenges on how Tesla, Google, Uber and Amazon could disrupt the car industry, and provide some thoughts on what approach Apple might take on creating the car if they are doing it.
This is a ridiculous assumption. These games were never loved for their realism.
another really good differentiators could be fully open source drivers, including base band firmware. That's becoming an increasingly important issue, and just apeing androids driver model where everything is closed and locked to some specific kernel versions really, really sucks.

It might not attract the masses, but it will easily snag a big following among people that care about this stuff.
Exports to Mars (2011)
I think Jony is even more pretentious than Steve. Isn't he the one that used red anodized aluminum to make a Mac Pro for a charity and then acted as if he "designed" a special version?
I still haven't seen any comparisons of this game with Mirrormoon EP, which seems a lot alike to me.

You could fly through space to any of the stars you see, it was procedurally generated planets, bright artistic colour design choices, etc.

The only thing that seems different is the much more content and actual realism in No Man's Sky.
Start at $30/hr then $50 then $100
Let's not get carried away. People still created music before copyright was invented.
Thanks for linking the article about Richard Prince, I hadn't heard that story. The artnet article they link to, Richard Prince Sucks [0], is even better.

"Here's what I've got by way of reflection: Prince likes images of breasts. We can trace appropriation precedents back to Warhol, and Prince as an early adopter, but who cares? Copy-paste culture is so ubiquitous now that appropriation remains relevant only to those who have piles of money invested in appropriation artists. The work on canvas looks about as good as you'd expect for a tiny, 72 DPI image, which is to say they are fuzzy and better viewed on a phone."

[0]: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/richard-prince-sucks-13635...
Ilf and Petrof's "The Golden Cath" is a must read, if you speak Russian. Not sure if it translates well. I think both The Golden Cath and 12 Chairs would make awesome comedies if properly adopted to modern day US. I know Mel Brooks tried with the 12 Chairs, but he failed.
If you mean that from the left edge of the keyboard you have Fn and then Ctrl, then yes it's correct, however I checked my Bible and (un)fortunately God decided that the order of keyboard keys just wasn't worth divine inspiration.
Isn't the melody the part that's copyrighted? The article seems to think so, at least.
Multiple parallel continuous reading
Well I'm sure you'd find proponent of no copyright. There was no copyright in the middle ages and many good children songs come from there.
> And now patio11 is the posterboy for "charge more"

I'd say that, if Patrick had believed in charging more from the start, he wouldn't be nearly as outspoken about it now. It is presumably (close to) the #1 thing he wishes he could tell younger-Patrick—but, since he can't, he's telling everyone else who'll listen.

Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder what Patrick would have to say to the HN community at the time, the one who stood up to defend his undervaluation-of-self? I mean, maybe they'd have defended him no matter what side of the coin he was on, given that he's a pretty central member of the HN "tribe"—but I'd be interested in a corollary post to the "charge more" posts that goes more like "don't praise people for charging less."
The Apple Watch is a hardware device so I think you've picked the wrong reference for his supposed unrefined software taste (which I think iOS 8+ proves this incorrect).

Also you've shown a comparison between a first generation device and first generation device, what is particularly wrong with the watch?
I agree. Jobs got away with his act because he more or less invented it. Jony is acting the act. From what I've seen, I find him really off-putting.

Once tasted wine at a place where the host was too slick, too smooth, too rehearsed. I had to walk out and leave our group with it. He reminds me of that.
Why nothing in there about the current lawsuit?

http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/u2yv5yz8/california-central...

This is a topic that's dear to my heart since I've written/am producting a screenplay that uses the Happy Birthday song twice, and am thus in the position of having to budget for either a performance license or legal action over a song which is almost certainly in the public domain.

Edit: I see another commenter brought it up earlier today.
For those saying that this is unreadable, I really think that the trigraph alternative is for you! Instead of ~- and -~, you can use ??-- and -??-. IMO, those are much clearer.
Private Label Meal Planning Service
So I just launched (like 45 minutes ago) my new startup, Mealgeni (www.mealgeni.com), and I'm looking to get as much feedback as possible!

I realize that the website is not the greatest and I'm hoping to hear all of your thoughts on the actual service. What do you think could make it more appealing to gyms, fitness trainers, and corporations?

I appreciate any and all feedback!
3 years in a very unpredictable field is a very long time. Anyone can come up with exactly the same product in much less time than before.
> Today in US it is absolutely not interesting to study the self-reflections of people with too much time on their hands in a society without opportunities and without good access to mental health professionals - ie. Russian literature (as well as literature of almost any other culture - because they pretty much all deep in the past and the issues they explore in many cases has already been answered).

I disagree with the grammar of your point. I think most of the issues you're referring to don't have answers--or direct ones at least. They're meant to serve as exploratory exercises into morality, the human condition, and the other age-old questions that will continue to engage mankind so long as we don't have all the answers. That sort of self-reflection isn't uniquely Soviet, nor is it entirely separable from works that are more focused on human progress and advancement.

We study and value these works for similar (if not the same) reasons we study and value history. Implying they are not applicable to our times seems awfully short-sighted.
The trailer implies that these games offer worlds of boundless possibility, what it really is, is worlds with a bunch of generated primitives and sliders to change some numerical parameter. It's not that the trailers for these games lie, it's just we subconsciously expected more.

To achieve what we expect, the programmer needs to implement features that allow emergent gameplay and unpredictable situations to arise alongside procedurally generated settings. There are few single player games that actually pull this off. Dwarf Fortress, ARMA, and GTA V to name a few.
I have one generation prior (model 9333). Bought it as a refurb on ebay, immediately removed Windows 8 and installed Ubuntu 14.04. Had some issues with the touchpad and installed 14.10 - now it works like a charm! It's a great notebook and it's awesome to see an Apple alternative that isn't Windows (though I felt bad that some money went to MS since I bought a refurb).
> in about three week’s time, beginning around six hours after sunset each evening

At the height of summer the night doesn't even last five hours (northern europe), how would you cope with that?
so patio11, was lionhearted an influence on you?
Isn't this a different case though? As I understand it, the price/tiers on BCC is heavily A/B tested which was discussed before (I can't find the post, maybe it was on the podcast?) The "charge more" idea is always mentioned in the context of negotiations, knowing what the customer can pay, knowing the no-confirmation level of corporate spending, etc.

I don't think those ideas are incompatible. When you're selling mostly to teachers and people who have fun with kids you're not going to make millions.
Since they specifically say Desktop, I'm guessing they're measuring updates to stuff that's only on the Desktop (say, Unity or something).
An insider’s view into the largest arbitration award in history
I can't stop thinking that if I bought it, even taking a loan of $57k, I could both pay back the loan and live comfortably off the profits here in Eastern Europe. With some effort it might be possible to increase the revenue - if I remember correctly Patrick said he has not been putting much time into BCC lately.
I hadn't seen that originally, but, while reading it, I thought "this seems to me exactly what Patrick did". So, it's too bad everyone attacked lionhearted when his advice was basically exactly correct.
That's more of a general linux issue, sleep has never work correctly on linux :)
Want Great Longevity and Health? It Takes a Village
And nobody ever said the same thing about iPad.
We should make more of an effort to understand the rise of China as it happens. Someday a few decades from now we'll look back and try to figure out how China surpassed everyone else. We only seem to understand events after they've happened.
"E.g. I'm working on an ahead-of-time Ruby compiler.... easy..."

If you haven't already... it's 2015. You might want to go look at the sun-bleached bones of all your predecessors who confidently proclaimed that all the dynamic scripting languages were slow for no good reason and a JIT could totally just JIT all the slowness away.

If it's a journey you wish to take, by all means, be my guest, but, please, be sure you know what you're getting into.

(The aforementioned sun-bleached bones are the bulk of the reason why I no longer believe in the old adage that "languages don't have performance characteristics, only implementations do", at least in the full sense intended. Languages may not have performance characteristics but the evidence rather strongly suggests they can put upper bounds on performance.)
body {
color: #777;

This is on a page with a white background. You might want to reconsider this for the benefit of vision impaired readers (or even those trying to read with some glare on the screen, as I am now).
Very cool. I love seeing stuff like this: simple things that illustrate how easy it is to get going with concurrent programming in Elixir/Erlang.
> if I remember correctly Patrick said he has not been putting much time into BCC lately.

You're right: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/12/22/kalzumeus-software-year-...

"I worked less than five hours on Bingo Card Creator this year. It runs itself… not particularly well, but it runs."
Oh please, your position is very popular in this industry, as you acknowledge in your third line. I think Happy Birthday is very much out of copyright, but I don't agree that 'copyright is a legal fiction created by congress that exists solely to prop up industries.'

Example, I mentioned elsewhere that I'm working on producing a screenplay which involves the Happy Birthday song. I'm not enthused about having to budget for license fees for this. On the other hand, without copyright I would not be able to share the script with other people to get feedback or solicit their interest in making it into a film, because I would have no way to protect my interests as an author. From my point of view the screenplay represents about 4 months' worth of labor, and it will likely be 6 months' worth by the time it's at a final draft. As director of the project, that total labor involved will rise to well over a year's worth, more likely two. My ownership interest in the intellectual property is the only hope I have of making money off that investment later on should the film get made and prove popular.

If you don't believe in copyright, what do you think is my economic incentive to create original work, or anyone else's to commission/purchase such work?
Yeah, one of my Chrome tabs on OS X got really stuck too. Took half a minute to even close the tab...
If it's anything like where I live (Brisbane), the airport railway line is privately owned as opposed to publically funded like the rest of the network. The service (maintenance and operations) is then contracted out and given that there's only one player (cityrail) it goes to them. As a result, the fare is much higher.
> I mean, maybe they'd have defended him no matter what side of the coin he was on, given that he's a pretty central member of the HN "tribe"

Are you sure it's HN tribal thinking that resulted in the vehement defense of patio11? Because I have a different theory: I think a slightly different crowd is now the majority (most entrepreneurial, more money-oriented) from the old more hacker-oriented crowd at HN.
Do you have one of the Intel wifi cards?
Neat! :) And thanks.
What a lot of nonsense. I would have hoped for more from a journal that facilitated one of the greatest and most harmful scientific frauds of all time when they published the Andrew Wakefield paper about autism and vaccination [1]. The Lancet also doesn't publish data except what they can stuff in a single PDF and sell their journal through the glorified academic extortion racket Elsevier. So yes, thanks for pointing out 'nobody is ready to take the first step to clean up the system.' Completely empty rhetoric.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield
Yeah. It's kind of unfortunate that some people still think that by simply focussing all resources on one problem you can solve that problem. Has that ever been the case? Or even possible?

Either way, we do things off Earth for the same reasons we do things out of our towns and countries. It has been working out pretty well for us so far.

This has probably be linked too many times on HN but here are Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger's words again.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html
Indeed. I also consider 70 to be pretty young for a retirement home. Statistically speaking, I assume the vast majority of 70 year olds (95+%) are living independently. So I thought either OP is being redundant and low-balling or giving a sample size. Didn't know.

Btw, through a quick web-search, it appears the average for new residents is mid-80s.
Seriously, the amount of jokes about the iPad when that first came out were hilarious because now all those jokers have an iPad themselves.
Free Website Builder and POS System for Marijuana Retailers Wanna #GetHybrix?
I had the same thought, as I do have some spare cash and am in the market for a low-maintenance, profitable side project. But I did some due diligence on the actual numbers when it was for sale, and... chose not to pursue it any farther.

I wish the new owners luck, but it is definitely a project needing active effort at this point, not just a side income stream.
Right-- but Ive also seeks to reduce form so much to the point where it begins to impede upon functionality. Take the thickness of the iPhone 6, for instance. The drive to reduce the noticeability of the hardware is at the direct expense of battery life and camera quality; I'd certainly consider this a failing of his design philosophy.
They don't have to process every violation notice, you know. They can just index them, put them in long term storage somewhere offline, and wait until they want to make an example of someone for a wholly unrelated reason...
> The Apple Watch is literally an iPhone on your wrist[0]; it's quite ugly for a watch.

I agree; it's literally an iPhone 1. But I think the iPhone 1 looked the way it did due to some pretty heavy design-constraints—it wasn't simple, back then, to get the amount of hardware they did into the package-size. And the same is true today with the Watch. I fully expect the package to shrink and the design to become less "forced" and more "designed" over time.
I think it's nonsense that Ive would be working on future Apple Stores or even spending much time on Campus 2 (it has largely been already designed). Pretty clear he will be spending more time with Marc Newson designing the next category of products i.e. the much rumoured Apple Car.
It does not work in the UK.
We're looking for some Alpha testers to try the system. Visit the site or tweet us @GetHybrix to get started.
It might look like an iPhone in a way but frankly, it'd be odd if it didn't. The question is whether they just shrank the iPhone software - that's what matters - and quite clearly, they didn't. There are a few changes they could make but for a first generation product, they nailed it on so many levels.

Regarding aesthetics, clearly that's subjective, but many traditional watch enthusiasts (such as Benjamin Clymer of Hodinkee and Ariel Adams of aBlogToWatch) have had a number of good things to say about the hardware design.

From Hodinkee's fantastic Apple Watch piece[1]: "Apple got more details right on their watch than the vast majority of Swiss and Asian brands do with similarly priced watches, and those details add up to a really impressive piece of design"

Finally, to address your initial point, I see no evidence that his software taste is less refined, nor that his hardware work is getting lazy. iOS 7, which I suspect is what you're referring to regarding his software taste, received some negative feedback when first unveiled but has since become well liked, albeit with a few lingering usability concerns, especially since they refined it with iOS 8. The Apple Watch bands alone are incredibly well designed, with a number of improvements over traditional watch bands that the Swiss ought to be ashamed they hadn't invented yet[2]. I'll give two examples.

1. If you've ever changed a leather watch band, you'll know how much of a pain it is. Most people go to a watchmaker to change them. Apple Watch bands are easily interchangeable. How obvious, right? Yet nobody else does this.

2. If you've ever bought a watch with a metal link bracelet, you need to have it adjusted for you at the store. Why? Because you need a specialist tool to do it. If you ever need to change the size, you need to go into a store to get it readjusted[3]. Again, incredibly obvious to make this user interchangeable, yet nobody else did it.

If Ive was as lazy as you say, he would have been happy to use traditional watch bands, the type that every other watch and smartwatch uses, and require users to go into an Apple Store to change them or to adjust them. Two examples of great design, off the top of my head, just for watch bands - I can't imagine how you think he's lazy.

[1] http://www.hodinkee.com/blog/hodinkee-apple-watch-review

[2] And this isn't due to a lack of innovation. The Swiss (and watchmakers of other countries too) spend a lot of time sweating the details on watch straps, buckles and deployant clasps, e.g. http://www.rolex.com/about-rolex/bracelets.html

[3] In addition, the tools for this often proprietary or vary by brand. Check out the variety of tools that are available for adjusting watch bracelets: http://www.ofrei.com/page237.html
Leather watch strap spring bars (the little bit of metal that attaches the band to the lugs) are also often proprietary.
It feels like there needs to be a mid-range Elance site. Perhaps some minimum prices to avoid the bottom feeders plus the workers are vetted to a higher level of skill/quality.

On Elance, I've used it for some basic jobs. I'm absolutely going there for affordable labor on lower skill projects, but I'm not trying to get Facebook @ $100. A typical job would be for someone to do a basic template brochure website build (with all copy/structure mocked up) for $600-$1,000. Locally this would be $3-8k. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me for a cheaper country wage... though perhaps people would disagree.

As a client I find it tough to find guys that offer quality work. The contractors I've used are more than helpful but consistently lack attention to detail and value ad in the build process I would expect from experienced designers. Time is valuable and it seems to be death by 1,000 cuts on small comments a quality designer would typically sort out before you see.
To be a little more specific, there is no risk when a group of friends sing happy birthday to someone they know in a restaurant. However, if a restaurant's staff routinely sings the song to customers, then people will come to that restaurant specifically to receive this service - which is profiting off the song.
been using neo4j lately and loving it.
apenwarr's implementation of djb redo[1] contains a minimal, shell implementation of redo in its `minimal/` subdirectory.

It seems like the downside to using redo would be that there are .do files sitting throughout the source tree. It'd be nice if there was a way to consolidate several .do files into a single Redofile, similar to a Makefile or Sakefile.

Like the non-minimal redo, sake is also implemented in Python. I wonder how they compare, performance-wise.

[1] https://github.com/apenwarr/redo
Not in Romania.
Or, just a thought, we just wait 100 years (which is nothing on a cosmological, time-between-asteriods scale) and see what tech we have then.

Did Scott's and Amundsen's trips actually improve any technology that enables us now to have boring research stations at the southpole? It seems that the general scientific and economic progress just happened to also produce the means, as well as the reason to go there again.