_yosefk

By "investing", you mean front-running the central bank, right?

How is "discriminating against a group" different from "balancing its overwhelming predominance in a particular field"? The dictionary definition of "discrimination" says there's no difference. Is the definition that says there is a difference some sort of a moral standard? What are the thresholds of that standard - at what point group members outdoing others warrants affirmative action and by how much the numbers of those members should be dwindled by affirmative action? Which groups should be punished by affirmative action - ethnic and gender, or is religion a legitimate target, what about height, family history, a preference to wear clothes of a certain color - whom is it OK to count and then hold to a higher standard to balance their overwhelming predominance?

Also - what cost should society pay in lost output due to the average ability of people allowed to enter certain occupations having been lowered by affirmative action (as it has to be if less capable candidates are admitted instead of more capable)?

Perhaps most interestingly - how much cost should a group supposedly "helped" by affirmative action pay for the dubious favor in (A) people being unable to successfully function at institutions who admitted them, not because of their abilities, but due to affirmative action and (B) perfectly capable people of the "helped" group being stigmatized because "everyone knows they only got to where they were due to affirmative action, and not due to their ability?"

(I guess you might notice that I'm not a huge fan of affirmative action, but if we could at least agree that there's no reasonable way to distinguish between "affirmative action" and "discrimination", that would be in itself awesome, even if we disagree about the merit of, well, that one thing with two names...)

That's me alright, but I think my comment in this instance didn't warrant the claim about "religious dimensions." Having a firm opinion and using (OMG) the word "shit" when stating it does not mean it's a religion, and I'm very secularly using much of C++11 as I said, and I was among the people pushing for the upgrade where I work.

Well, your definition of bad C++ devs may differ from mine or Google's. Or it might not, but for all I know, you might require knowledge of arcana that I don't care about, even when I happen to know it.

To me success includes being able to find (not frequently replace - I like working with the same people for many years - but find new ones in order to grow) developers that can contribute to the code base, and some of the best ones I know can't be bothered to learn much of C++. Go figure. Maybe you and I legitimately disagree because we work on different things, and maybe one of us is wrong.

I didn't mean that energy prices are affected by a guy on HN voicing his opinions on them, just that many people become more likely to voice their opinion because of having a position, because they feel good when they convince others, even if doesn't actually affect anything (much the way I'm typing this comment right now... WTF am I?) So someone saying that they have a position in a commodity is not necessarily a good source of cool-headed arguments supporting that position. (At the very least convincing others makes those others lose money together with you and I believe it's tremendously more fun to many people to lose similar amounts together than losing more than your reference group.)

But I agree that in hindsight, I did not phrase my original comment to convey the above, I ended up conveying what you refuted...

I don't deny that there are useful features in C++11/14 (though I find "modern C++" an irksome marketing trick by people peddling a disgusting programming language; it was called "modern" since at least the early 2000s and it was disgusting then.) Of course I'd rather iterate over std::map with a range for loop than use the C++98 way, and as to lambdas - while I find them way too awkward and limited compared to closures without the sharp edges (and with garbage collection), and a ton of "modern C++ code" went batshit insane in its extent of unnecessary reliance on lambdas, lambdas remain much more practical than the alternatives when doing things like some sort of a parallel_for. But then it's hard to find a language whose version X+1 adds nothing useful to version X.

Is C++14 a better language than C++98? It's hard to tell (I think it is - I think C++ is worse than C, but having gotten to C++98, perhaps it helps more than hurts to add all that other shit), but it's not an interesting question anyway because the upgrade is easy enough and it's worth it for most people for their specific reasons, so C++98 will die out.

But then it's not like Google aren't upgrading to the latest C++ standard, they're just doing it slowly AFAIK.

...and ugliness is software's!

> Google is still just another enterprisey megacorp employing 30000 blub programmers. Expect the usual 'enterprise' failures.

Ouch! That must have hurt 'em. Of course the original meaning of "Blub" is "anything which isn't Lisp", especially C++ (as well as say Java.) But what the heck, it has a good sound to it.

Anyway, I think their C++ style guide isn't bad. As to "modern C++ style", let's wait for a few years, shall we? When the STL came out, auto_ptr and for_each(v.begin(), v.end(), FunctorFromHell()) were marketed as the way to go for a long while; then the usual suspects became a bit more silent. Now again, despite their being a smart for loop, for_each with a lambda (with its crazy capture lists and all) is supposedly considered at least as good as a for loop, and typically better. And you're supposed to use unique_ptr and what-not. Maybe a few years down the road things will look different again.

C++11/14 has a ton of weird shit you ought to keep in your mind on top of the weird shit in C++98/03 and many "enterprisey megacorps" seem to apply a restricted subset of C++ rather successfully.

Well, prediction markets do better than polls, but actual financial markets are in part prediction markets and they do pretty badly at times and sometimes there's a guy who calls a bubble long before it pops. And that guy doesn't necessarily stake a huge fortune on that prediction. So yeah, talk is cheap, and yeah, on average people are more careful with their wallets than their mouths, but on the other hand, people sometimes have interesting things to say, and asking how much money they bet on being right is less interesting to me than asking how they arrived at their conclusions. Now in some cases I will ask someone how much money he'd put on being right, but I'll do that when I think they're either wrong or fairly uninformed and yet very opinionated.

Erm...

* QE was tremendously inflationary for all asset prices, including real estate prices which are not called "consumer prices" but it's not that easy to buy the argument behind it. Certainly for a lot of folks, real estate is their biggest expense, and it's very frightening to rent and not buy while housing prices go up all around you and you try to guess how far the cost of owning will become detached from the cost of renting. We can call people scared into buying overpriced houses "investors", but to me it's a bit of a stretch.

* Grandparent calls real estate, of all the asset classes inflated by QE, the new currency.

* You then, without agreeing with the grandparent, say QE isn't inflationary, as "understood" by many economists long ago. But if we stop calling houses "currency", is QE really not inflationary then? (I seriously don't think I fully understand it, BTW... So an honest question.)

I don't know if a guy "putting his money where his mouth is" is more or less trustworthy than a guy who isn't:

* If I have a position, I'll want to convince everyone that I'm right because it'll make me right (if everyone thinks energy stocks are worthless, they will be.) That's why most people with lots of skin in the game, long or short, are very happy to publicly argue that their bet is correct.

* Someone very risk-averse can think, correctly, that he's likely right, but loathe the 10% probability to lose money. Conversely, someone can be near-addicted to gambling and make bets based on very little, or someone can just be wrong regardless of their risk preference.

Overall, a random commenter's arguments seem more interesting to me than their claim to have bet on being right, even if I trust this really hard to verify claim.

That programs and libraries get installed in a consistent place is nice in some ways I guess, but for me it's always been terrible, since it's more often than not really hard to install multiple versions of the same program or library (and therefore two programs using different versions of the same library. The hairier programs can't even be built from sources on "the wrong OS version" by most mortals, not to mention installing binaries; try building KDevelop 3 on an OS where only KDevelop 4 is made available by default.)

Another maddening thing is how Linux distributions can't agree on where any bloody thing is - even env, which in large part serves a workaround for the inability to count on absolute paths, is at /usr/bin/env on some distros and /bin/env on other distros. So is something as basic as tcsh. How to write a portable tcsh script in these conditions I don't know. (And "you should use bash" misses the point, and also brings fond memories of #!/bin/sh script breakage when it turned out that sh is bash on some systems but dash on others.)

Bill Gates said in the 80s that there are many different Unixes and this will remain a problem for a long while. Damn, did that man make a good prediction! As to Linux - Richard Stallman said that it's a kernel, not an operating system. Damn, did the various distributions go out of their way to prove him right, creating many different, not Unixes, but Linuxes!

Of course he does! And I'm already mentally preparing to part with a large share of that money which I have left after paying the income tax, the capital gains tax and those other taxes. ("The rich" will not mean Warren Buffet or Ron Garret who have the money to dodge a new tax, it will mean those who failed to spend everything earned.)

Interesting! How are they taxing "illiquid" assets like real estate, paintings or jewelry?

Generally, however funny or bad this sounds, justice isn't the only objective of a justice system - various kinds of impact on behavior are other reasonable goals (you might believe three strike laws to be just but oppose them because it incentivizes to murder witnesses), as is lowering the cost of the justice system itself (a treatment of every case that is just in isolation might not be a good or even a just deal for society if it costs taxpayers $100M to process each case, even if it's relatively trivial.) (I'm not saying that any specific justice system is good or bad, just that justice shouldn't be its only goal, which I think is an intuitively obvious point for most but a very contentious point for some.)

I think Stalin gained influence in part by "having the goods" on a lot of people, but I don't have a citation on that. This didn't happen in a democracy to begin with, however, there was much more open discussion and dissent within the ruling party before Stalin than after.

(I don't have a firm opinion on what modern surveillance will do politically over time, just answering your specific question.)

Well, yeah, I'm just saying it wasn't a picnic at 40nm or 90nm, either. It didn't go from a walk in the park to a nightmare at 28nm.

Also I believe all the bugs in TFA are logical bugs where the circuit would have misbehaved in a logical simulation, not the kind where the circuit "flips zeros to ones" or vice versa because of physical implementation issues. In this sense advanced nodes make things worse only indirectly by enabling larger, more complex designs.

Not that I believe the Russian economy to be better-run than the American, but right now the US does have the big advantage over just about everyone else of being able to print the world's reserve currency, which makes it easier to make the rest of the world pay to solve its problems, and I think the US did use that trick a lot after 2008 (QE being debt monetization, and the Fed's balance sheet having grown with no clear date when it'll shrink back.) So it's a bit hard to compare the US to others.

As to how well markets functioned wrt the 2008 crisis - one question concerns credit rating agencies. If you believe that they didn't do their jobs well, then it should be troubling that they didn't go out of business, quite the contrary, it's the same small number of firms which still operate in this business. If you believe that they did do their jobs well, because the government bail-out resulted in most junk debt being repaid to creditors, then you essentially don't believe that markets function very well, as they seem to have made a correct calculation that they can extract money out of taxpayers through this junk paper, and that is not what any economist would praise as markets functioning for the benefit of society.

(Two counterarguments to the above that I heard are, the government caused the housing bubble in the first place, or alternatively the government helped smooth/stabilize asset prices, including housing prices, which is a proper use of monetary policy, and the paper was never "really" junk since housing prices rebounded later. Dean Baker argues against the latter based essentially on buying homes getting costlier relatively to renting them in bubble years. The former counterargument is voiced more rarely which is perhaps why I haven't heard a counter-counterargument. Anyway, I think this whole thing is a bit muddy...)

I figured you were an Arab Muslim. FYI, Israel has affirmative action where Arabs have a lower standard of admission into medical schools, for example; "racism", perhaps, but of a different sort (which is not to say that no Israelis exist who are racist, just that most aren't and that the state isn't, at least not in comparison to most others.) Where you heard about taking control of Al Aqsa I can only guess; of course 99.99% of Israelis don't want it nor did the state ever attempt it and we let the Waqf destroy Jewish and Muslim archeological artefacts alike as they please there. In general Israel is the hundredth probem on the list of any Arab state, and putting it closer to #1 by singling it out as the one state to be excluded from supply chains etc. is IMO unlikely to help with the first 99. But then again I'm more than a little biased...

"Agree as well" with what? I basically said the US killed far more people for far worse reasons - do you agree that Israel is different in that sense? What about Russia where Intel operates and which invaded Georgia and Ukraine? Do you think Intel should stop operating in the US, Russia and Israel (and relocate to the moon, presumably?) or do you think Israel should be singled out (why?)

Also - why single out Intel? Why is it OK for oil companies to operate in the Middle East where most oil-rich countries either wage war directly or subsidize it?

I dunno, Adapteva taped out at 28nm with 5 people. Do you mean that full custom design is particularly hard at 28nm or that it's hard for EDA vendors? 28nm is also a bulk node, I think it ought to have been easier to understand for everyone relatively to FinFET nodes.

How about operating in the US, which on average kills 3-4 civilians per 1 enemy combatant (Israel kills 1) and starts wars for no apparent reason (what did Iraq have to do with 9/11 - that's more than 100,000 people killed, do you have an idea how much more that is compared to people killed by the IDF in the last decades? Why support "rebels" in Libya or Syria?)

I sincerely envy people who're happy working their asses off to buy fancy cars and even houses, as it's a relatively affordable ideal. Those of us whose ideal it is to do what we please with our time are desiring something that seems to be more expensive on average.

If you work somewhere and everyone else gets a raise because there's a new company-wide minimum wage, but you don't get a raise because you were already compensated above that level and you got there through hard work (or so you think), you might quit, not because you resent the people who got the raises, but because you figure that you'll get a better deal at a place that gives raises to people who work harder.

As to state-wide minimum wages - "the" argument against it is that less people are employed at a higher price of labor and that those priced out of the market are likely to be the ones hurt the most by it, though their numbers might be smaller than the numbers of those employed at the higher wage. (Of course this applies to the company with the $70K minimum wage as well: that company could have used the money it cost to implement this policy to instead hire more people.) There are counter-arguments along the lines of the demand for labor being inelastic and other such, but it's kinda off to not present a sensible argument against a minimum wage while presenting a crazy strawman argument against it, the latter implying with a high likelihood that the author supports a high minimum wage.

VLIW DSPs are in every phone. VLIW CPUs are almost certainly a bad idea and as to GPUs, AFAIK VLIW needs to coexist with barrel threading there which might create problems. But VLIW certainly has its place.

Advice presented along the lines of "there are no reasons to do anything but that which I recommend" is usually somewhat flawed... just because there are so many reasons to do different things in different situations.

Regarding calloc (which indeed might be slower than malloc contrary to TFA) - a variable that should have been initialized to something but instead keeps zero bits written by calloc is not necessarily a great situation. If you use malloc, at least Valgrind will show you where you use the uninitialized variable. With calloc it won't, though it might still be a bug - a consistently behaving bug, but a bug nonetheless. Someone preferring consistently behaving bugs to inconsistently behaving bugs in production code might use a function my_malloc (not my_calloc...) which in a release build calls calloc, but in debug builds it calls malloc (and perhaps detects whether it runs under Valgrind and if not, initializes the buffer not with zeros, but with deterministic pseudo-random garbage.)

You said it, man! Nothing is more fun than smashing imperialism. I think I'll close the tab and go smash me some right now.

Why the quotation marks? If you were working on Google Translate, then dealing with this sort of thing would be on your TODO list as an exploit, not an "exploit." As a user of Google Translate it's not helpful, either (that a user thinks that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia are both evil states does not mean that the user is helped by reading about a war of Mordor against Mordor.) It's funny and all, but it's definitely an exploit.

They show bugs in cfront, trying to sell their product to C++ developers. They'll likely call cfront high quality.

That said, Roskind's experience is more telling than the output of a static analyzer because generally and certainly with a compiler, actual testing shows orders of magnitude more issues than static analysis.

Perhaps someone sent a request to Magic+ along the lines of "I want Magic+ to become the number one item on HN"? It's legal, it's possible - and they're on it. It'd make a decent demo!