_yosefk

C is more portable than the LLVM IR though. So you get an inferior in some ways, but a more portable program as your compiler's output. And if you want to debug in a debugger that uses a proprietary format rather than DWARF, C will work better than LLVM, etc.

C is an OK target for a small new language; it's probably too crummy for a big, successful one (C++ certainly is one data point here!) But IMO for 90% of new "small" languages that can choose between C and LLVM IR, C isn't obviously the worse choice.

I dunno, it's very easy for me to express things differently in C++ and get a different runtime. It's easy enough for a bunch of C++ programmers writing needlessly slow code whom I've known. It must be equally easy for the author. The reason he doesn't ought to be vast experience with C++, so that he doesn't try obviously dumb things (as in things that malloc a ton of stuff needlessly, etc.), whereas his Rust experience is necessarily smaller. I think you need quite a bit of experience to declare that, well, experience just doesn't help because the performance model of this thing is weird!

As a 10/10er, I think the fact that people tend to score less goes to show that:

1. The photos are low-res enough to hide the most ridiculous artifacts produced by neural nets

2. The machine-generated images are trying to emulate the likes of van Gogh, not the likes of Leonardo (again hiding the extent of NNs complete inability to understand what they're doing)

3. Most people simply neither paint nor appreciate visual art, so this is not as powerful as the Turing test! (One point of the Turing test is that a human easily passes it, because all humans speak; they don't all paint.)

I got 10/10 (no Facebook or Twitter account to share this, unfortunately.) Update: my wife got 10/10, too.

Right now neural nets do pretty poorly with "loose/messy" styles (you get noise instead of brushstrokes; if they posted high-resolution images there, I cannot believe anyone would score less than 10/10.) Neural nets do exceptionally poorly with "neat" styles (try copying the style of the Mona Lisa into your photo and it'll paint an eye into your mouth.)

However, I'm pretty sure that an algorithm hand-crafted to replicate an artist's style might fool me (just like a hand-crafted chess algorithm wipes the floor with a neural net plus some tree search; not so for Go, I know - I don't even play Go so I don't have a firm opinion on that one.)

I must say that this whole "photo + style" thing really gets my goat - not the research as much as the sort of press coverage it gets. I project that a stock market crash will improve such coverage significantly.

What you pointed out is significant and I probably should have mentioned it in the article together with the other things; my point, however, is that these problems kick in at a higher frequency than those historically reached by many accelerators and defended as "optimal" by marketing. In your example, 1 GHz is used as a "nice low frequency" which is a sensible order of magnitude for a modern process; people often believe that you have to go as low as 400 or 100 MHz. (Again, the numbers vary with process, this is just to illustrate the extent of the difference between what I think is the reality vs what I think are the popular beliefs.)

Sticky for people already employed, perhaps, but probably not for new hires, I'd guess.

Also, anecdotally, in 2008 some of those fired were expensive new hires. "The bottom 25%" might be defined as those fired but otherwise I don't think there is a definition of "bottom" those who get fired all fit. Say, if a project or a department is terminated, often everyone is let go, instead of trying to keep "the best" and replacing "worse" people elsewhere with them, etc.

Have I ever used the Pirate Bay? Why, it's illegal! Have you ever used the Pirate Bay?

Anyway, I crafted my link for comedic value rather than "realism", and then my point was that someone could put, on a web page in their own full control, a link that points to pirated copyrighted material beyond reasonable doubt. You talk about the difficulty of a site with user-submitted content to place limits on what that content can be, which is relevant if someone proposes draconian copyright enforcement measures, but it does not refute my point. As to PB having non-pirated content - sure, and the red light district probably has businesses that sell food, but PB is like my link example in that nobody would buy a claim that its main use isn't pirating copyrighted content.

Again - perhaps it's reasonable to have laws letting people get away with it because any alternative laws are worse (or we could have no copyright law, etc.) All I'm saying is, you don't have to be completely ignorant to say, hey, there are guys who don't only piss into the swimming pool but they do so standing on the springboard, and how about we discuss ways to stop them.

Also, and somewhat independently from the above, you mention in a sister comment that you're a filmmaker. That's interesting - I didn't know you were - and I guess I'm an aspiring filmmaker myself. But that is different from being dependent on the income from filmmaking. Someone trying to live off their own films is in a pretty tight spot right now because basically they compete against a near-infinite amount of de-facto free-as-in-beer content. You mention that Hollywood is alive and well but many in Hollywood disagree, it hurts them a lot - as to someone with a smaller budget, making a profit is unlikely. I don't know how matters could be better, though perhaps if it were illegal to sell/give up the authors' rights, and if we'd be forced to pay per view or some such, and the enforcement of it all was practical, things would be better. Or they might have been worse, I dunno...

On the other hand, and not that I'd like to be sued for placing links, if the link in my page is something like <a href="ftp://thepiratebay.com/avatar.mp4">Avatar Movie Download</a>, the argument that the page had the text of the Holy Bible in it last time I checked might not be very convincing.

So I can see how someone might mull.

Microsoft indeed improved quality a lot, though Windows 7 inexplicably grinds to a halt and sometimes outright hangs on my desktop occasionally (one can blame my Wacom tablet but that contradicts the thesis of driver verification working wonders), and Windows 8 periodically renders the laptop unusable, using near-100% of the disk bandwidth (I tried like 5 tweaks recommended on the web for this problem, nothing helped.)

But that is not nearly as bad compared to having to rely on software developed the way they do in the aerospace business! From http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2010/02/09/public-tv-figu...:

> Who crashed Colgan 3407? Actually the autopilot did. … The airplane had all of the information necessary to prevent this crash. The airspeed was available in digital form. The power setting was available in digital form. The status of the landing gear was available in digital form. …

> How come the autopilot software on this $27 million airplane wasn’t smart enough to fly basically sensible attitudes and airspeeds? Partly because FAA certification requirements make it prohibitively expensive to develop software or electronics that go into certified aircraft. It can literally cost $1 million to make a minor change. Sometimes the government protecting us from small risks exposes us to much bigger ones.

(I agree that Apple's cash hoard does not make $1M sound like a lot, however, they also have much more software to tend to.) Overall, it seems that today you have to trade correctness for features and development time, and the cost in features and development time cannot be borne by a market participant unless the market is regulated so that all competitors have to do it, in which case the user is going to get way, way less functionality. I believe that the cost of bulletproof correctness might drop significantly enough at some point to change the game - and I really, really hope formal methods will take off big time, without being sure they can - but it doesn't seem like we're there yet. (This is my opinion, not data, of course; the one thing that I think $millions buy that works very well without costing too much time or features is automated testing.)

Humans do require training, they're slow, they sleep, rest, lose concentration, vary greatly in performance etc. All true and economically significant.

That is however distinct from no machine being able to do some of the things humans do as of now. It just means that most things they can do, they do better than humans. But first they must be able to do it.

I get the "leveraged up the wazoo" part, it's unpleasant when someone defaults on debt that you hold. To match 2008 however, the pile of debt ought to be large enough and the risk has to be mispriced. (Those who hold junk bonds expect defaults and so hold a large bunch of such bonds hoping that only some will be defaulted on, and they also hold other assets. That plus the high yield of the bond before it defaulted should make things smoother.)

The deflationary spiral bit I do not get. By itself, a cheaper resource should increase consumption because now everything is cheaper and you have as much money you can spend on stuff as you used to. Externalities aside, this kind of deflation is not what's called a "deflationary spiral", is it? A deflationary spiral is when consumption goes down because people don't have money to buy stuff, and then producers lower prices, profits fall, people are fired, consumption drops further, prices fall even lower, etc. But cheap resource availability is different, theoretically, because then consumption should rise instead of drop, not? (Also it'd be a bit strange if say finding large new deposits of some resource were a guaranteed economic disaster; one would think it should make things better.)

Actually, having a generic way of saving the program state into an executable that then runs from that point could be really useful, and some Unix versions had it (and Perl used a Unix utility called undump to implement a "Perl compiler" where it dumped core that could be "undumped" into a running program later; that's the same idea as "unexecing" program state into an executable.)

Long names are hard to read. This makes autocompletion dangerous (I had a terrible bug where I locked the wrong of two mutexes with long, descriptive names which were too similar visually.)

A good name is short enough to read as a sign in itself, it shouldn't be parsed as a sentence.

The more code reuse there is, the less you might be using the same name, as a sister comment says - but the more names you have, and a lot of long names is really hard to read. So I disagree with sister's "downside" of "it's bad for bad programmers". It's even worse for otherwise good ones who buy into this style. (Or maybe not, maybe they just read differently from me and say Rob Pike who objected "names which are short essays about the thing they name.")

Until it isn't. Once humans are handily beaten in both games, it's kinda hard to tell which game is harder (I guess you could compare the amount of computations needed to beat the top human player, but that does not let you distinguish if it's harder for computers or conversely easier for humans.)

Actually, Marx was saying the exact same thing about machinery unemploying people that HN is saying every now and then(I don't have a firm opinion on the matter, I just found it amusing to read the same argument made 150 years ago; Marx actually credited a whole slew of other economists with making this argument.)

The quote (from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price...):

"...one might infer, as Adam Smith, in whose days modern industry was still in its infancy, did infer, that the accelerated accumulation of capital must turn the balance in favour of the working man, by securing a growing demand for his labour. From this same standpoint many contemporary writers have wondered that English capital having grown in that last twenty years so much quicker than English population, wages should not have been more enhanced. But simultaneously with the progress of accumulation there takes place a progressive change in the composition of capital. That part of the aggregate capital which consists of fixed capital, machinery, raw materials, means of production in all possible forms, progressively increases as compared with the other part of capital, which is laid out in wages or in the purchase of labour. This law has been stated in a more or less accurate manner by Mr. Barton, Ricardo, Sismondi, Professor Richard Jones, Professor Ramsey, Cherbuilliez, and others."

(I personally am not a huge fan of Marx's writings, mainly because of the strong contempt for humanity that I feel emanating from them... incidentally I've recently stumbled upon this one, though.)

A scary analogy in favor of this argument is, a horse cannot economically perform almost any job today, hence most were slaughtered though few were kept for amusement. That happened after horses had a very good run where every improvement in technology increased "horse employment." If a machine exist to outperform a human in any conceivable job, it's not very different (and then you get to the discussion of the political options.)

A counterargument is that up until now this argument was wrong many times, and that we're very far from an AGI, or even from machines beating humans at every possible task.

There's a lot of machine effort though, if the data structures are big. If you're doing computer graphics or vision and you have to send images or 3D assets around, it won't perform very well. I think Armstrong consistently underestimates the cost of messaging compared to shared memory - or rather the fact that systems where this cost is prohibitive exist, just as much as systems where his approach works great exist.

They are used for other things, but

* They're better at graphics than that other stuff,

* Other auxiliary processors exist which beat GPUs on most kinds of that other stuff (though they aren't as accessible as GPUs),

* Most importantly, what sells GPUs is first and foremost their performance on graphics workloads. A GPU with stellar OpenCL performance but sucky OpenGL performance will be outsold by a huge margin by a GPU with the reverse characteristics.

So they're GPUs alright.

Are you extrapolating from something that did happen with other organ transplants, or just assuming it would happen even though it didn't happen with other organ transplants?

BTW, one big problem for a rich old guy is, it's very likely that their head is the weakest link, not the body. If the body has cancer which has metastasized, the head is not very useful. If the body has some other problem, it could probably be better solved by transplanting a single organ. And most of all, a rich guy who had all the means to care for his body is very likely to have preserved it in a nice shape but his memory is failing them, etc. etc. An old brain in a new body doesn't sound that great, really, not as a means for life extension. "Just for fun" might interest some generally healthy aging people, on the other hand; these people would be heavily stigmatized though, in all likelihood, even if they managed to get the body and were willing to take all the risks.

I think it could be very useful in rare cases is the upshot.

That's true, and it's true of most languages, and unfortunately people trip over it even when they can totally avoid it by hiding threads behind other abstractions. So yeah, silly of me to have forgotten it.

That said, AFAIK language-level invariants in Java (and Python, etc.) cannot be violated by the lack of thread safety; meaning, you can still inspect every live object and see its state. Program-level invariants might go to heck, for sure. So what I should have said is more along the lines of "memory safety" than "lack of undefined behavior"; I'm not sure what the shortest and most precise way to put it is, though. (It does not quite end with memory safety but it doesn't quite get to lack of undefined behavior, either.)

Neither your comment nor the comment you cite replies directly to mine - meaning, neither of you addresses the question what happens if people refuse to work for universities at the current level of compensation (perhaps some do not have a better option right now, but those who studied STEM certainly do.) I claim that comp will have to go up, boom, problem solved. Where am I wrong? What other solution would you propose that cannot be circumvented by the employer as long as the employees are willing to help circumvent it, for the same reasons making them willing to accept a raw deal now?

Instead, your comment in particular rejects what I said because it's "neoliberalism." All I said was that employers will tend to give you shit as long as you take it, be it for-profits, non-profits, government or individuals. I don't think that's quite the same as denying externalities or market failure or generally arguing about neoliberalism and other abstract concepts at a great distance from the issue at hand.

In concrete terms, I believe the someone quitting a bad job or not taking it in the first place is better off than someone who does take it and then broods about the debasement brought about by neoliberalism or whatever the supposed root cause of their condition is. In other words, my angle is more productive than yours as a basis for action.

I don't know about uptime, but most of the new programming languages have no undefined behavior (a Java program always behaves as a Java program whatever your bugs are), while most of the old languages do have undefined behavior (even Ada has garbage-initialized variables.) Hardware-wise, there's memory protection and virtualization, whereas old Unix, Windows, etc. all let you crap all over any piece of memory because there was no efficient way to prevent arbitrary machine code from doing that. Security also improved tremendously, in relative terms.

So we're far from unhackable, never-crashing software, but then cars, too are still relatively dangerous, just much less so than they used to be.

(Now one interesting thing that I wonder about, though, with all those thank yous going out to the government, Ralph Nader and other deities in sibling comments, is just how reliable this crash test is; meaning, what happens if you try other angles, which are not in the standard test.)

Unlike the other political comments, this one is on topic and, in my humble opinion, very funny!

Erm... isn't the actual root cause of the problem raised in TFA the opposite of debasement? Namely excess supply of people who're willing to go into academia to "do the most essential work in society", whatever the terms, as a sister comment from an insider pointed out? If the perceived value of being in academia was low enough, the market would force the universities to treat adjuncts better.

Also, aren't most or at least a great many of the most famous universities non-profits, competing for donations instead of trying to maximize shareholder value? I hear that in for-profit education, the average student is treated better and so is the average lecturer (you want to please your students whose money feeds you and you want to attract lecturers whose primary motivation is financial and who're good enough to please your students, so the for-profit institution kinda has to treat both well to survive.) Somebody living off donations, on the other hand, only has to please people donating the money (and someone living off taxes only has to please government officials), while pleasing either students or the teaching staff is no longer essential.

(I don't have firm or specific opinions on how higher education should be run, in general, just commenting on your points.)

These numbers can be explained with IBM having peaked before Microsoft which in turn peaked before Apple in terms of product development. So Apple's revenues are still growing fast, Microsoft's are growing more slowly and IBM's are declining - with none of them doing new stuff and all of them being past the peak (I'm not sure that's actually true, just saying that grandparent's point/question was what they've done lately/that they didn't do much, and this point is not refuted by revenue growth numbers because revenue lags a lot after product starts. Microsoft's greatest hits by far are still Windows and Office which it develops since the 80s.)

Your link says John Major instituted a fixed exchange rate regime and made pounds overpriced. Soros didn't even break the news (a German official did), he just made the most profit shorting the pound. I wouldn't call it "breaking the pound" unless you think the pound was priced about right and he made his profit manipulating the public opinion and thus moving the market.

BTW, I found the interview rather trite; he's really full of it.

You're probably right (and you'll remain right if "Soros" is replaced with the name of many, many people), but I don't think you're the kind of source the grandparent asks for; I think they wanted evidence that Soros shorted the euro or something similar.

Even if he's short the euro, it kinda seems that no single famous, connected billionaire can make or break the euro. It's, like, a really, really big, erm, thing. He ought to believe his bet to be correct rather than hope that him talking about it will move the market very much. So if he's indeed short the euro, I'd guess you're hearing his true opinion (which doesn't make him right, it's not like he's never lost money, it just probably means he's honest in this particular instance.)

It's pretty easy to hack a comment form so that there's no real heavyweight craptcha but on the other hand a bot will not know to fill it unless your site is specifically targeted. Security by obscurity. Works like a charm for me.

I use WordPress, a huge PHP blob with a database, for my self-hosted blog. I somewhat agree with the parent and sister comments in that, as a programmer, the way these things work irks me out.

However, I don't agree with the apparently widespread conclusion that it follows, from this sentiment, that not publishing is better than publishing using a less-than-lovely platform. I also don't agree with the widespread corollary, "build your own blog", when as a result you get less features than the irksome WP would give you (a common omission is support for comments - I got some amazing comments over the years, if you think it's not worth having this feature, I think I see where you're coming from, and I think you should reconsider.)

I treat blogging software as I treat any other - I dislike most programs that I run, but I often still choose to run them because the result is worth it. I can't see how "it's not worth" to run PHP+DB in order to be able to publish your thoughts. This is not to say that, given today's alternatives, WP or similar should be chosen over those alternatives, just that not using any of the available options because they're all too irksome feels over the top.

As someone who isn't a native English speaker, I've long noticed that, as you mention, "minority" doesn't mean "the opposite of majority" (I'm not sure since when, or exactly what it does mean; you say success is key, but success in what field - chess, boxing, beer-making? Listing just a dozen fields is probably enough to demonstrate that no minorities exist according to the "success" definition.)

However, to return to grandparent's comment - I, similarly to its author, have never noticed that the word "color" had been similarly redefined. Isn't "a person of color" the opposite of "white", where "white" means a having skin with a color at a mostly-agreed-upon pinkish/palish range?

I wasn't arguing with your analysis of the differences between asking different people different questions and asking everyone the same questions but then holding different people to different standards. I was only arguing that "discriminating against a group", taken literally, is equivalent to "balancing its overwhelming predominance in a particular field", taken literally. That is, I was arguing with that sentence, without assuming that these two names for what I claim are the same general thing are also names for two different discrimination methods (which are two different specific things as you pointed out.)

Regarding "intent, technique and impact" - I agree on technique and impact, intent is a thornier issue; certainly nobody ever instituted discrimination for reasons they proclaimed evil, it's always done in the name of "righting wrongs," and then real intent as opposed to proclaimed intent is very hard to establish. From my own point of view, at the gut level, some discriminators seem to act much more maliciously than others, but I'm not sure there's always a reasonable argument to support my gut feeling.