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davidacoder

264 karma · joined August 28, 2011

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davidacoder··on I bricked my Christmas lights
Oh, I would so love to see you succeed with the Amaran lights, which presumably would lead to all of the Aputure stuff being reverse engineered? I think if there was an open-source integration for them with say the Elgato Stream Deck or Home Assistant, it would be a major, major success story. For all those YouTube folks that do talking head at their desk this would be sooo much better than controlling them via an app on the phone.
davidacoder··on Composable multi-threaded parallelism in Julia
You could use this to build something like PLINQ, but this is at a lower level in the stack than PLINQ.
davidacoder··on Optimizing .*: Details of Vectorization and Metaprogramming
It is worth pointing out that this blog post is old, from January. Julia 0.5 adds a phenomenal new feature, the dot syntax [1], that automatically fuses vectorized expressions. I believe that feature was added quite a while after this blog post was written.

Currently the dot syntax works for all functions, except for operators like .+, but in julia 0.6 it will work across the board. At that point, an expression like

  A.*B.*C
will automatically be translated into the de-vectorized loop version that the author identifies as the fasted way to implement something like that, without the need for any macros or other special tricks.

[1] http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/functions/#dot-sy...

davidacoder··on Giving up on Julia
I followed your interactions with the core devs, at least the public ones. I think the core devs handled the situation with an enormous amount of patience and tact.
davidacoder··on Giving up on Julia
I've been using julia for a little more than two years now. I've been subscribed to all the mailing lists and regularly read the github issues. Not all of them, but a fair share. I've never, ever seen any behavior by any of the core devs that one could even remotely describe as toxic, rude or anything like that. The community is actually really helpful and supportive.

I have seen this point about a toxic dev been made before in some blog post. Back then I followed the story up because it seemed so at odds with my experience with the core devs. It took a bit of googling and following links, but in the end, in my mind, there was simply nothing to the whole story. The supposedly rude behavior was not at all rude, imho.

I don't really know where these allegations come from, but I find this kind of "I've heard second hand that there is a toxic dev" inappropriate. If someone has a problem with someone, make it explicit, post the email that you dislike, so that others can judge themselves. But these vague accusations are not helpful, and at least from my point of view entirely at odds with how I have perceived the behavior of the core devs over the last two years.

I should say that I'm not part of the MIT crowd. I've never met or talked with any of the core devs and don't know them beyond reading their emails on mailing lists and sporadic interactions on github.

davidacoder··on Microsoft’s Hardware, Round 2: Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2
The top edition already is $1700, the cost of adding LTE must be a pretty small fraction of total cost at that point.

For business people your arguments 2 and 3 are actually incorrect: I don't want to use my personal data plan for my work. If the device has its separate LTE, it can just all go to my company and I'm done with the costs.

davidacoder··on Microsoft’s Hardware, Round 2: Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2
Well, sure, for a consumer device that I use on my couch in the evenings, I certainly don't need LTE. But the Pro seems pretty geared towards business, right? For business travelers this makes a huge, huge difference, though. And it seems to me that the high end Pro version is probably exclusively targeted at business users, at its price.
davidacoder··on Microsoft’s Hardware, Round 2: Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2
Why, oh why is there no version with 3G/LTE? That is by far the biggest bummer, imho. For people that are on the road a lot that makes such a difference, and pretty much all other tablets offer that option, so it seems really lame to not have that. Also, if I spent $1800 for a Surface Pro in the best configuration, I really would expect it to have the same connectivity as a iPad mini... Other than that, this seems like the perfect device (the Pro version).
davidacoder··on Microsoft looking to release Office for Linux in 2014
Yes, multi window finally works as it should in Excel 2013. That alone was a reason for me to update the second it was released.
davidacoder··on Show HN: Python Tools for Visual Studio
Earlier releases emphasized NumPy/SciPy for IronPython. Is that effort dead? There were major holes, like no support for matplotlib, and I had kind of hoped that these would be filled over time, but now it looks as if the whole thing is moving into other directions?
davidacoder··on Surface Pricing Announced - $499 USD
Also, doesn't have a GPS, so only WiFi location services...
davidacoder··on Surface Pricing Announced - $499 USD
I can get tethering to work, my mom: never. My parents both got iPads and a device that isn't just online all the time could never ever work for them. iPad really set the bar on that one.
davidacoder··on Surface Pricing Announced - $499 USD
No 3G at all? Zune all over again.
davidacoder··on PowerShell vs. Unix shells
But you can't use things like git from ISE because it doesn't support interactive console apps...
davidacoder··on PowerShell vs. Unix shells
Copying files is an excellent issue: at some point I suggested either on the PowerShell blog or their feedback site that PowerShell should have the ability to copy files via remoting (essentially what you mention, you can remote into a box via powershell and need to copy a file from your local machine onto the remote box).

The response I got from someone at MS was quite telling, it went something like "please tell me more why you would ever want to do this, when we have existing folder sharing technology in windows". I gave up, if they seriously don't understand why that is NOT the answer to situation, gee...

davidacoder··on Designing AWS Architecture to Withstand Outages
I looked at Azure to see how these things work there. Here is my current understanding: blob and table storage in Azure Storage is automatically geo-replicated between regions. If you don't want that you can reduce your storage cost by about 30%. VM disks are stored in Azure blobs, so if a region goes down you should actually be able to create a new VM in a different region and attach the SAME disc you had attached to the VM in the region that went down.

For the SQL datbases they provide a sync service that can replicate your database automatically between different regions (or even a local database).

I have no clue how reliable all of this is, but at least in theory it looks as if it might be quite a bit easier to do full geo replication across different regions on Azure.

Anyone with actual experience?

davidacoder··on Microsoft Expected to Introduce Tablet
I bet this is the mysterious project Dave Cutler has been working on lately!

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-confirms-dave-...

davidacoder··on Germany's Leading Technical University Cancels All Elsevier Subscriptions
The title on HN is incorrect. Only the mathematics department is canceling their subscriptions, not the whole university.
davidacoder··on How a LinkedIn phishing scheme could empty your bank account
Is a system that has Windows Update switched on, i.e. is up to date with security patches, at risk? That might be a cheaper way than to buy their software...

It seems to me that if you use up to date versions of the MS software stack there are numerous defenses built in that would render this attack completely moot. The fact that they don't say anything about which software versions are at risk makes this look like one of the typical sales promotion efforts of security firms rather than good info.