_yosefk

"Do you know what ROI stands for? Radio on the Internet."

If you think your political opponents are short democracy, and only your political allies are long, you're not helping democracy function. The biggest advantage of democracy over alternatives is that when a decision is made, an entire nation can feel that it owns it (the extent to which nations are masters of their own fate under democracy is debatable, but the feeling surely prevents civil wars on all scales, the utility of which is hardly debatable.) Sore losers thinking of a massively popular opponent as being outside the system and of the majority's decision as non-binding on the grounds of it being outside the system definitely undermine democracy - the only question is whether they undermine it necessarily or unnecessarily.

Of course there exist politicians who demand that democracy is dismantled, and in that sense are outside the system. But claiming that your opponent is that politician should be done only when he really is that politician, because you're in effect claiming that the conflict with that politician is not resolvable within the system of democracy - effectively you say that democracy will not work to win this battle. So if you're wrong and the politician isn't as anti-democratic - for instance if he's the kind of guy who'll step down when voted out instead of attempting a coup - then you calling him hopelessly anti-democratic is the one demanding that democracy be dismantled.

Islam obviously doesn't equal jihad as proven by >1000 years of history, but do you think civil rights are "on Iran's curriculum", to pick a Muslim country as far from Saudi Arabia both religiously and politically as possible?

Rent control and protectionism are different, and immigration for instance, a hot subject in today's politics, is another thing altogether.

Supporting rent control doesn't make you stupid/uninformed, but the only other option is evil.

Protectionism is a complex topic in a world with currency manipulation, labor laws variability and geopolitical conflicts; it's only simple (and evil/stupid) in a world without these things.

And immigration is not just about economics, it's about who you want to live next door and vote. Here, people can disagree regardless of economic views.

People who lie about having checked signal integrity suck. I have a horror story of my own along these lines, with very creative memory corruption.

Then it wasn't deduplication. I swear it was a NetApp file server, two files, one modified by a program that logged the change, the other getting the same bits as the first, the time stamps were completely identical. Dedup was just a guess.

This works at higher levels of abstraction, too. For instance, NetApp filers have a deduplication feature, where identical files are detected and stored once instead of several times. When one of the files is changed, supposedly a copy on write happens. Yet in practice, I saw, more than once, two identical files, with completely identical time stamps, owned by two different users, where only one file was modified intentionally by a program ran by one of the users (that program logged its actions to a file, and the other user's log would be empty, plus there was no chance that both modified their files at the exact same time.) I concluded that NetApp's deduplication wasn't on the beaten path - or perhaps something in the timing or other specifics of our creation and modification of identical files was unusual.

The math examples look interesting, standard math notation and all. Though if I got it right, you get standard math notation with the help of TeX when viewing source code, I'm not sure about editing source code (I sure would rather write Matlab or numpy notation than use TeX in source code.)

Where are other biggish examples?

The "styles" page has the biggest bulk of interesting code that I've found in introductory pages: http://felix-lang.org/share/src/web/advocate/styles.fdoc

I guess one always wants to hear an elevator pitch of what a language does that is special relatively to relevant competition. What does Felix have that languages X and Y, its closest competitors, don't have?

Does anyone have a theory of why she did it? I mean, I can imagine using Gmail instead of corporate email if the latter doesn't really work and you can't do anything about it - definitely not the case here though. This prompts one to consider a more substantial motive than "getting a working email server" - perhaps hiding something from someone else working for the government - but to add up, it has to be worth the risk, and it has to be the least risky way of doing it.

So why did she do it? Or rather, what could plausibly be the reason?

If you look at it that way, it's also hard to theorize about stocks in that modern economic wonderland "we" (they?) have created. There could be, for instance, a large wave of defaults on the plentiful debt created by low interest rates, which is probably bad for stock prices, or else the trend of rising P/E ratios due to a lack of safer ways to get a return on an investment could keep inflating stock prices.

For someone with no responsibilities except work, 70 hour weeks are sustainable (did it for 3 years, not to be recommended, but no burnout.) People report way larger numbers of hours though and probably have to handle more than just their work; I don't know where things start to break down, they ought to somewhere.

If you think a nation's wealth is maximized under certain conditions, isn't the majority better off taxing that maximized wealth than pursuing a different policy?

What example workload cannot be implemented efficiently if your cores communicate using coherent caches, but can be implemented efficiently if they work in some other way?

All multi-core Intel chips have cache coherence. Intel might not have incorporated the paper's approach to scaleable cache coherence because they don't have a substrate to put 512 x86 cores on.

You don't store it in main memory, you store it in the directory, aka snoop filter, or whatever you want to call it. The paper actually estimated the overhead and came up with the number 2% for 512 cores, not that high.

Ouch! Appeal to authority stings. But in response, I pitted mighty Google against Intel and in the first ten hits for "cache coherence scalability paper" I found the one that prompted me to write my original comment:

From http://people.ee.duke.edu/~sorin/papers/tr2011-1-coherence.p...

"Using amortized analysis, we show that interconnection network traffic per miss need not grow with core count and that coherence uses at most 20% more traffic per miss than a system with caches but not coherence. Using hierarchical design, we show that storage overhead can be made to grow as the root of core count and stay small, e.g., 2% of total cache size for even 512 cores.

Consequently, we predict that on-chip coherence is here to stay. Computer systems tend not abandon compatibility to eliminate small costs, such as the costs we find for scaling coherence"

And now the quote from TFA:

"Do we really need cache coherency across a hundred cores or a thousand cores on a die?"

The paper's 512 cores are in the middle of the range where TFA suggests you start to get enough problems to seriously consider breaking compatibility and foregoing cache coherence. Why is the paper which supports its claims with concrete analysis less credible than an unsupported offhand remark from someone at Intel, a company that made a fortune from all of its CPU designs except that infamous one where they abandoned compatibility?

BTW a basic understanding of coherence might lead one to doubt the claims about lack of scalability. When you hit the cache, you know that you own the data so it's fast. When you miss the cache, it's a very slow operation anyway, the overhead of checking whether to fetch the data from external memory or another cache can't be that bad. And if data travels a lot from one cache to another because of true or false sharing, that's the fault of the code doing that. Coherence is not supposed to make sharing blindingly fast, just to make it correct, and to make false sharing correct as well.

Of course none of this will be relevant if there's no substrate on which to put a thousand of x86 cores, which right now there isn't.

Interesting that a guy from Intel says cache coherence doesn't scale; I kinda thought it scales pretty well, especially if actual data sharing is the exceptional case that must be made to work correctly, and non-shared data is the rule and must be made fast.

"Putting the photo of someone on Facebook (or Instagram) contributes to surveillance of that person. Please don't post any photos there that include me, and I suggest you avoid posting photos of anyone else too."

I wish Facebook (and G+ etc.) users cared, I really do. I also wish they didn't share their contacts with Facebook (and WhatsApp, LinkedIn, etc.) Of course nobody cares, so you can't really opt out of these social networks.

It doesn't ask people to renounce rights, it's just a person telling what the situation is right now in their experience, which is useful information. It's descriptive, not normative. Just like there's nothing wrong with telling someone it's dangerous to walk the streets of neighborhood X at night and it doesn't "happily" imply that it should be dangerous to walk the streets of neighborhood X at night.

I can't recommend treating immature behavior as a reliable signal of status, having seen a lot of immature people with no social, financial or educational capital whatsoever who were simply immature.

What if you and TFA are both wrong in that the opposite of bigotry and exclusion is completely open borders and that the latter is desirable? What if control over immigration policy is a legitimate thing to seek regardless of "perceived scarcity"? Or what if it's not legitimate but that's what the public genuinely wants? What if (much of) the root cause is in many other issues with European integration that many Europeans don't like even though you and TFA think integration is the cat's whiskers?

Except few Leave voters would agree with his explanations of their vote or want him as their representative, I'd guess. So him talking about failure to listen is a bit funny.

I used to like how overloading lets you call it sort instead of sortRectsByArea but over the years came to the opposite conclusion. Very short and generic names are great for locals or for truly generic functions but generally a function name shouldn't be too generic IMO, both because grep has its uses regardless of IDE support and because it makes it less necessary to look up definitions. mergeTableCells is better than merge even if you know it's passed a list<TableCell> because merge could be merging the cells or the cell contents or who knows what else, and because looking up the type of the argument costs in itself (as it's not always a local declared right near the call and even if it is, the type might not be spelled out in the declaration.)

Also, reusing names through overloading without providing actual polymorphism, either run time or compile time, is IMO bad, as in I don't get what's there to like. If one open function gets a file name and another gets a username and a password, what's so great in that they have the same name?

If Americans think this is released by Russia to harm Hillary, maybe they'll side with Hillary, at least more so than if it's released by Wikileaks, thought Hillary and started spreading rumors that the leak is coming from the Russians. "Reportedly..." "Reliable intelligence sources in the West have indicated..." Riiiiiight.

MS could, erm, look up those org charts on linkedin.com for $0 (indeed very useful at times.) What value is added by buying LinkedIn for $26G? How owning LinkedIn is going to add $1-1.5B/year (assuming eventually you want a P/E between, I dunno, 15 and 25), to MS's revenue?

(I'm sure someone at MS has an answer to this, it's just that they haven't been tremendously successful in the past with their big acquisitions; I don't think Skype or Nokia paid off. And in general tech companies often buy other companies without much apparent success. Why is it so crazy to doubt their wisdom in any particular instance?)

"The C++ community flames the Rust community" right in this thread. TFA didn't say there was no merit to the "safe C++ subset" [1], just that it's not here yet, it's not going to be as safe as Rust, and that it's often mentioned as if it's here and as safe as Rust, that's why TFA called it vaporware.

This thread is not refuting this claim but explicitly or implicitly blames TFA and "the Rust community" for misrepresenting C++ as dead, useless and not worthy of improvement.

Of course C++ is far from dead, enjoyed by some, and used by many more; TFA did not claim otherwise. Of course improving C++ helps those using it; TFA did not claim otherwise. All it claimed was that the current and potential future state of Rust relatively to C++ was misrepresented by people at the C++ side; I think you're more supporting than refuting this claim.

[1] I personally, unlike TFA and some commenters here, must say that I'm not thrilled about anything having to do with unique_ptr (which as TFA demonstrated is not guaranteed to be unique at all, but is as unique as its user made it) and other such; certainly if I have to rewrite an old code base to use new smart pointers, the change will involve every corner of that code base, and I think I'd rather rewrite it in another actually safe language if safety is what worries me. But that's just me; and BTW I haven't personally looked deeply enough into Rust to advocate for it, either.

Children, grandmas and people of every other age cannot set up and maintain a website as you'd most certainly agree, and as a nephew or any other relative I would at this point refuse to help because of the maintenance part which they cannot do and which will never end.

People will use things which most of the time do not punish mistakes too harshly and don't present problems requiring actual thinking to solve. I think people are right in refusing to use the other kind of thing because the alternative burns too much of one's time and is too risky. Big web companies manage to build such artifacts over the infrastructure that is the Internet and the WWW; I'm not aware of alternatives.

Why do you have to be like AMD - why can't you be like Apple, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, or, well, about any successful/large chip maker other than Intel and Samsung?

Regarding the edge of technology - Intel doesn't beat others to a new node by making both chips and fabs, it would beat others even if it was only building fabs. And it's not like TSMC is that much behind Intel. Grandparent who mentioned 28nm could mention 16nm except that there the masks will costs much more but it's still millions, not billions.

He also mentions the dominance of Google, Facebook and Twitter. Making a usable distributed alternative to these (or to Amazon, Airbnb, etc. etc. - even HN) is not an easy technical problem. It does not help that making money off such a distributed alternative is also not easy, but had it been easy enough to do, perhaps someone would have done it for free.

(Not to mention that for the average person, setting up a website and publishing something there is not an easy technical problem in 2016; most wouldn't know where to start. Personally, I'm not a web programmer but I am a working programmer and I can write a simple web app using a CGI Python script or Django or Rails, and for me setting up a website is fairly annoying in 2016. And anything involving non-static HTML is a PITA, and writing static HTML is no fun, either. The web is not the most pleasant thing, technologically, and this is one reason that a company amortizing the cost of dealing with the web over many users has an easier time than an individual trying to do something over the "bare" web without intermediaries.)

"Biomimicry has always been the way forward in every industry"

Care to elaborate? Certainly classical computers don't look a whole lot like the information processing of any living being (I guess one could argue that they mimic what humans do with pencil and paper, but it seems a bit of a stretch.) To me other things like say human-made engines also don't look that similar to any life form, but then I think I know very little outside computing, relatively to say the average person here, and hence I'm genuinely curios about your remark and "wouldn't be surprised to hear something surprising."