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bjwbell

458 karma · joined August 25, 2008

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bjwbell··on Austrian Minister Calls for a Constitutional Right to Pay in Cash
I do not want to give up any privacy. The stasi wasn't that long ago.
bjwbell··on Ask HN: Is Python dying?
It's dead because new projects aren't started in Perl unlike C.
bjwbell··on Choose GitLab for your next open source project
Code of conduct section in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/CONTRIBU...
bjwbell··on How Silicon Valley is dealing with mental illness
ECT gets a bad rap, but works. Anecdotally, my uncle went through it.
bjwbell··on How Silicon Valley is dealing with mental illness
What actually made a difference, for me, was changing my work. My dad experienced this too. If you're depressed maybe you need to change your life, this is hard. It was for me.
bjwbell··on Ask HN: What's going on at IBM?
It jelled with what I know anecdotally. Their Indian outsourcing is terrible, bad compensation, nothing close to Google or other tech companies in India. This is from a few years back.
bjwbell··on Ask HN: Which industry sector should I target?
Learn the art of writing gpu compilers. Software defined radio is another.

If you find web-scraping dull don't pursue it. Life is short.

bjwbell··on Twitter’s Silence on State-Sponsored Attacks
I follow the national weather service for my area (US). It's awesome they're total geeks about weather and share it.

Everything else is mostly meh.

bjwbell··on X.Org Might Lose Its Domain Name
What's bad about his benchmarks? I've cursory glanced at them before and didn't notice anything in particular (used to write gpu drivers for a living).
bjwbell··on Inside Graduate Admissions
Considering the completion rate for PhD programs, admitting a broader applicant pool would likely make it worse.
bjwbell··on Atlassian's success reminds what a crappy place Australia is for tech business
AT&T, rolled out fiber to many of the suburbs. I can't imagine switching back to Comcast, night and day.
bjwbell··on Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video]
You're right, the comparison isn't as valid as I thought, rustfmt has improved impressively since I looked at it last. 'go fix' might be a better comparison, what's the Rust equivalent?
bjwbell··on Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video]
I should have been more specific by tooling. I meant source code manipulation and analysis, go-oracle and goimports are a couple. There's many more in the go community.

Are they useful, I'm not sure. They feel useful but I have little trust in my judgment. When I switched back in the day from VS to emacs I didn't seem to miss all of the refactoring tools VS provided.

bjwbell··on Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video]
I'm thinking more of difficulty in writing rustfmt compared to gofmt. There's other examples like go-oracle or goimports which as far as I know don't have Rust equivalents.

How useful the extra tooling is, I don't really know.

bjwbell··on Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video]
Perhaps I should have said it's easier to write tooling. C++ has arguably very good tooling but creating it was difficult.

For Rust and Go the example I'm thinking of is rustfmt and gofmt.

bjwbell··on Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video]
I'm familiar with Rust's tooling, not knocking it at all.
bjwbell··on Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video]
There isn't one language to rule them all. An advantage of Go over Rust is easier tooling due to a simpler language, an advantage of Rust is a richer type system. These are in opposition.
bjwbell··on Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video]
Nice phrasing, unpleasant was the feeling I was going for.

Sometimes I wonder about giving up.

bjwbell··on Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video]
Some history might help. Go was created largely as a reaction to writing server side C++. I have sympathy after writing but mostly reading C++ code bases. I swore never again.

I react in horror to the features being added to CUDA and SyCL to make them closer to C++.

I still hate C++ with a passion, grepping around in gecko is much harder than servo.

bjwbell··on Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video]
That's why I said large set. I haven't thought about garbage collection enough to have any insight on it.
bjwbell··on Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video]
How do you have a large set of language features with them not interacting?

In Java, serialization and generics interact with practically everything.

In C++, RAII interacts with exceptions, which is the point but isn't exactly pleasant.

bjwbell··on What Is Spacetime, Really?
I don't find it unsettling but it's not particularly interesting. You can view epicycles as detour before Copernicus, I think that's more of the sense of what Wolfram is referring to as a detour.
bjwbell··on Sitting on an Ocean of Talent
For one, if you take global warming seriously it's a disaster. Each immigrant from a poor to rich country increases their CO2 emissions by about an order of magnitude.
bjwbell··on Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video]
Wrong C++. maybe that's why he didn't say, it's all of them (for an approximate value of all).
bjwbell··on A letter to our daughter
Overwhelming evidence is needed that Gate's philanthropy will be remembered more than his computing career. Carnegie is remembered for steel before philanthropy.

Carnegie's wiki page "Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish-American industrialist who led the enormous expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century. He built a leadership role as a philanthropist for the United States and the British Empire."

bjwbell··on What photos of Facebook’s new headquarters say about work
Rich Geldreich http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/01/open-office-spaces-and-c...

"1. North Korea-like atmosphere of self-censorship: ... even simple conversations with other coworkers can be difficult, because all conversations are broadcasted into the room and you've got to be careful not to step on the toes of 10-20 other people at all times. Good luck with that."

bjwbell··on Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?
It was hard for me to find projects I found interesting enough to contribute to.

It wasn't until I had an overarching purpose that I found success. It took about 5 years.

bjwbell··on Hacking GCN via OpenGL
That's what I know too for graphics draw calls. For GPGPU there's been hard work for finer grained preemption, last I looked into it (~1yr ago) on Linux it was a work in progress to put it kindly.

If you're curious, lookup the Intel Broadwell GPU specs, there's sections devoted to the various levels of preemption. If you're really curious look up the workarounds needed for the finest grained preemption (this would be preempting a single GPGPU draw call).

Then decide enabling fine grained preemption should probably wait for Skylake, unless you took too much Adderall and no challenge sounds impossible. Do I speak from personal experience? I plead the fifth.

I've no experience with how fine grained nvidia's preemption is.

bjwbell··on Today's world is amd64, armv7, and soon aarch64. Everything else is dead
With the cost in multiple billions to build a fab and the consolidation of semiconductor manufactures the reduction in # of architectures isn't surprising.
bjwbell··on Firefox: We Don't Need Google's Money Any More
Performance, I don't mean benchmark performance but the sucky stuff.

Today on Linux I have to restart Firefox every ~20min because it slows to crawl. I don't know why and don't really care, because it'll take an unknown amount of time to root cause and 6 months from now an OS or browser update is likely to cause something similar.

I'm not dissing the Firefox devs. Google seems to have more people to throw at this problem.

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