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cmccabeon Graphics Chips Help Process Big Data Sets in Milliseconds

It's silly to make blanket statements like "FPGAs have become as capable, or more, than GPUs."

It depends on what you're trying to do! If you want to multiply big matrices, GPUs are great for that. A lot of scientific applications work well on GPUs. And obviously, GPUs are great for graphics.

Also, FPGAs are no longer blank templates on which you can stamp any design. The new ones all come with built-in "IP blocks" which you can't change. So you get a bunch of gates you can modify, but also perhaps dozen CPUs and a bank of memory, or so. Maybe someday GPUs and FPGAs will converge-- the former are getting more flexible, and the latter are getting less so.

The biggest problem with contemporary GPUs is that they're I/O-starved, which I don't see anywhere in your comments. PCI-e is just not enough bandwidth. That is why GPUs are a sideshow in big data. It doesn't matter how many cores you have if you're sipping your data through a straw.

The power consumption argument seems like a strawman. Replace a few incandescent lightbulbs in your home with LED ones. Congratulations. You can now run your GPU 24/7 and come out ahead in power consumption.

cmccabeon Ask HN : Anyone from Facebook on HN to help my friend being bullied on Facebook?

Aaaand... the first reply on HN is a bullying response telling the submitter to "get a life." Hilarious.

cmccabeon No More Callbacks: 10,000 Actors, 10,000 Threads, 10,000 Spaceships

In order for a programming language to get used:

* it has to fill a need people have.

* people have to know about it.

* it has to have a mature implementation.

Age helps with point #2 and #3.

With regard to JavaScript, the web browser pretty much forces you to use it. So it doesn't really matter how good or bad it is, it will have adoption.

cmccabeon No More Callbacks: 10,000 Actors, 10,000 Threads, 10,000 Spaceships

Python is 22 years old, Golang is 4 years old. Give it time.

cmccabeon The San Francisco Exodus

There are a lot of startups in San Jose.

cmccabeon The San Francisco Exodus

The capitol of California is Sacramento.

cmccabeon Should editors update 80 columns guide to something wider?

Telling people to use 80 columns because "we inherited it" is just cargo-culting. Intelligent people will rebel against that.

Instead, tell people the actual reasons why we use 80 columns. It is because your eyes have to physically move as you read a line of text. Forcing them to move too far causes excessive eyestrain. Additionally, when lines are excessively long, you lose your place in the document by the time you get to the end of the line.

These are the same reasons why newspapers have multiple columns, even though it would be easy for them to put everything into a single giant column. Shorter columns are more readable.

In a way, the question is akin to asking why we still have minimum font sizes even on "retina" displays. You can buy a monitor that can display teeny teeny fonts, but you can't buy eyeballs or a brain that can make sense of them. Similarly, you can easily have giant lines of code on any monitor from the last 20 years. But good luck reading them.

There are some additional issues which are specific to computer code. One is that extremely long lines often come from excessive nesting, an antipattern.

cmccabeon Should editors update 80 columns guide to something wider?

You can use something like this:

  grep --with-filename -A 3 error $FILES | grep -C 3 description

If that's not elegant enough for you, there are even tools like pcregrep that can do multiline matches. Don't uglify the code because of easily solved tool problems.

cmccabeon Intro to (images in) Go

My first impression is that you don't know how to use the Google.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-nuts/Cl_D7PIi...

cmccabeon Should editors update 80 columns guide to something wider?

Using grep with strings that span multiple lines is not a big deal. Use the -A and -B flags, as well as --with-filename.

Widely agreed-on code standards do exist. Usually they are either 80 or 100 characters per line.

cmccabeon Should editors update 80 columns guide to something wider?

It's not about the screen or the computer; it's about the primate sitting in front of it. Long lines are unreadable. That's why newspapers have multiple columns.

cmccabeon ‘Dutch sandwich’ grows as Google shifts €8.8bn to Bermuda

Yeah, designing clear and well-written laws is a boring waste of time. Congress has much better things to do than that. We should just punish people arbitrarily based on "intent" and the shifting political winds.

cmccabeon Distributed grep client in Go

I could also read content from system files by using the advanced hacker tool "cat".

I don't see what this has to do with exec.Command.

cmccabeon ‘Dutch sandwich’ grows as Google shifts €8.8bn to Bermuda

It's very practical. It's called sales tax. Gasoline sales taxes are supposed to be used to maintain roads.

In general, taxing income and profit is difficult to do fairly. It requires a really complex and invasive bureaucracy that scrutinizes everyone and every business. Sales tax, on the other hand, is easy to do fairly. You already have to regulate sales to enforce anti-fraud laws, food and drug laws, and other regulations.

People often say that sales tax is regressive, whereas income tax is progressive. But in practice, income tax is regressive, really falling only on the middle class. For example, multi-billionaire Warren Buffet pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secreta...

cmccabeon Distributed grep client in Go

exec.Command doesn't run a shell; it just executes the command. So yes, it's perfectly safe to have spaces and other shell metacharacters in there. Whether or not it's efficient here is another question, of course.

cmccabeon On comparing languages, C++ and Go

A more obvious example is minified JS versus regular JS. Briefer? Definitely. More expressive? Definitely not.

cmccabeon A "Hacker's" Guide to the Bay Area

You probably want to live in the San Jose area. There are a lot of good neighborhoods like Willow Glen or Campbell. Get a place close to I-280 rather than US-101. 101 is not as well maintained and it's crowded all day.

San Mateo is not a bad place to live, especially if you like urban areas. Rent is more expensive there, though, and there is more traffic.

cmccabeon On comparing languages, C++ and Go

"Brevity and expressiveness are not the same."

"Are you sure about that?"

"Yes."

Do I need to explain?

cmccabeon On comparing languages, C++ and Go

The point that corresation is making is that none of the optimizations you did had anything to do with C++. You could have easily done them for the Go version, but you didn't. Then you put up a chart and said "this is why C++ is better." Huh?

cmccabeon On comparing languages, C++ and Go

Are you sure about that?

Yes.

cmccabeon Going long long on time_t

Please don't be disingenuous. We both know that using #defines, you can get a type which is exactly 64 bits on any modern architecture. The fact that long long and long int are a builtin types and int64_t is implemented in terms of them, rather than the other way around, is just an implementation detail.

cmccabeon Post Scarcity Economics

Some of this is questionable. For example, he claims that "by the 1980s... saving became passe" but that doesn't make sense. If anything, saving was useless in the 1970s and earlier, when inflation was out of control at more than 15%. It's kind of weird to be in favor of soft money and deficit spending, as he clearly is, and then get upset about mounting debt.

There are a lot of reasons why a London home that was 300,00k in the 1970s is now worth three times that. More people are living in London now than then, and due to London's "green belt" policies and height and zoning restrictions, there just hasn't been a great supply of new houses.

Tom doesn't even mention things like the oil shock, the impact of technology and automation, or demographics. It's kind of hard to get a reasonable picture of the economy without considering these things!

I agree with the basic point that we should have more Keynesian spending, but the history felt like a distraction. Calling the 70s a "golden age" is just... what is this, I don't even. Yeah, with the Vietnam war, OPEC, Silent Spring, and the threat of nuclear war, it was a real picnic...

cmccabeon How Snowden's Email Provider Tried To Foil The FBI Using Tiny Font

Because it refers to http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-087

cmccabeon Bitcoin is Worse is Better

Whenever I see the "worse is better" meme, I know I'm in store for a criticism of some engineering decisions or other by someone who doesn't understand the decision criteria. (And often, someone who was pushing an alternate solution that failed because of this lack of understanding.) Engineering is more than just implementing theoretical work. It's about making tradeoffs in the real world.

cmccabeon Going long long on time_t

Here is how stdint.h on Linux conjures up the int64_t type.

  #if __WORDSIZE == 64
  typedef long int int64_t;
  #else
  typedef long long int int64_t;
  #endif

cmccabeon Replacing Python

You're starting from a false premise, which is that Boost is good. In reality, Boost is stuff that either couldn't make the cut to get into the C++ standard library, or is so new that nobody knows whether it's any good or not.

cmccabeon Use Only as Directed

You can kill yourself with almost anything, including water.

Did you read the article? The whole point of it is that the dose of acetaminophen found in many pills in the US is dangerously close to the level at which liver damage occurs.

The same can't be said for other painkllers.

cmccabeon Use Only as Directed

MDMA would be a much better substitute for alcohol, since it doesn't cause long-term cognitive impairment or lung cancer.

Of course, I don't encourage anyone to use drugs that are currently illegal, since what you're getting is not pure.

Either way, it's off-topic.

cmccabeon Use Only as Directed

That's a good point. I don't really have any hard information on which is more dangerous in terms of ulcers. I find conflicting information online. One thing is for sure: you should NOT take either aspirin or ibuprofen on an empty stomach. Always eat something first.

I tend to lean towards aspirin for a few reasons. It's older (100 years versus 30 years old) so we've had more time to figure out what other side effects it has, as well as interactions with other drugs. The blood thinning effect reduces the chance of heart attack or stroke (while it's in your system), which is always nice. There are some studies which seem to show that aspirin has anti-cancer properties, but I'm not sure if I believe them, because they have not proposed a mechanism of causation. Finally, ibuprofen seems to be sold in higher doses in general and have a more intense effect, which isn't really want I want. I just want something that does the minimum most of the time.

cmccabeon Use Only as Directed

I don't subscribe to the belief that people deserve to die for not doing exhaustive research on the over-the-counter medications they take. You might want to rethink your position, since you apparently didn't do enough research yourself when you said that acetaminophen has "a lack of negative interactions with other drugs." Acetaminophen interacts with a lot of commonly taken drugs, such as alcohol, ephinedrine, and lomitapide, not to mention things that most people don't consider drugs like white grapefruit juice.

The reality is, unless you're a child or a teenager, you should just take aspirin. It won't damage your liver or give you an ulcer like acetaminophen or ibuprofen. And it is actually an anti-inflammatory, not just a fever reducer and mood-altering drug.