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Uh, this is just a total misunderstanding of how and why these systems work the way they do.

Of course command grammars are recognized on the device, otherwise you wouldn't be able to turn your TV on using a command or use basic functions in a speedy manner.

And, of course they send audio data to a server -- because your TV does not have a complete language model for up to date web search or even tv guide installed a priori. i.e. good reasons that have nothing to do with "capturing revenue stream".

Sigh...

Beats me. (pause)

I could hear no difference before or after the switch -- in fact I couldn't hear any beat other than the clapping.

I think you're a little quick on the trigger, it's not just cheaters who assume that people cheat, it's also people who have been cheated upon or lied to.

In general, I think this is asymmetrical. People who have never had to deal with complexity in their lives, tend to assume that people can live by simple rules. Until they discover that the world doesn't work that way. Usually by getting their naive ass bitten.

They don't call them realists for no reason. (Yes, I know, spoken like a realist :-)). I don't place much value on the opinions of people who tell me how perfect they or their family is -- usually they avoid digging too far into the fascade because their self-worth is tied to how well they and their group (family) perform whatever role they are holding up as ideal.

libtask isn't using the ucontext syscall (normally), just the ucontext_t struct. If you look at the source code, it provides local assembly versions of the context swapping code for the most common architectures.

That said, your library is quite nice in that it just provides the co-routine wrappers and nothing else, which I appreciate. Also, your switch code has less instructions (are there cases it doesn't handle?), but if you look at libtask's code, it probably not going to be 100x faster. :-)

A lot of this hinges on whether you believe you should be exempt from your own moral standard.

The idea of "racism" as requiring a position of power comes most directly as a reaction to the "reverse racism" bullshit from racist apologists who want to roll back affirmative action and various other programs. The reaction comes from sympathetic academics and writers who would rather focus on words and philosophy, and are better at that, than practical issues "on the ground" so to speak. And yet, AA is an example of something which is known to be imperfect, but is needed in some practical sense -- much like the tracking of race or gender ratios in various careers. I think it's a huge mistake to attempt to redefine words in terms of power, because it plays into the corrupting idea of power as the ultimate goal of human endeavor.

The reverse racism shit is really dumb, but the proper response is that there is no such thing as reverse racism, just racism, and that racism is borne from improper over-generalization and a unwillingness to examine ones own prejudices about the world. It is not borne from attempting to correct for those things in other people (e.g. AA, etc.).

Racist views may be understandable as a reaction to oppression by the oppressed, and you make allowances for human frailty -- it is still not generally acceptable. Redefining the word "racist", or any negative epithet, such that it can never be used against your particular group, whoever they are, is just an invitation to corruption.

Uh.. I would say that "well-articulated" is debatable, unless the whole article was meant as satire.

"This article makes me cringe. Is the author gay or a pseudonym for a girl?"

You are officially part of the problem.

What makes Smart TV's basically useless long-term is that throwaway line you put on the end about the cable box.

The same is true of AppleTV, playstation, xbox and every game console in existence. Some of this is obviously hardware based, but a lot of it is about differentiation. CableCard has existed for at least a decade now, but good luck trying to get your cable company to admit it. Every single one of these guys wants you to stay in their particular ecosystem, and "smart" TV is just another ecosystem Samsung wants you to buy into with the associated limitations -- either introduced by Samsung or the other vendors (lockout).

What people really need is better integration between all the devices they hook to their TV. It's bizarre (but like I said, not totally unexpected) that a consumer electronics device is so hard to use that way compared to a radically more complex personal computer (plug most usb devices from a big box store into a mac or pc and it'll just work for its intended purposes without a hassle nowadays).

One way to accomplish that is to shove all the functionality into one device, but as I mentioned above, it doesn't actually work except for a few limited cases. Honestly, the closest you get to a true "smart" experience is a top-end harmony remote -- and that's obviously not that close at all.

My basic objection to smart tv is that I have the same experience using a harmony remote, it adds nothing. And the smart features are virtually guaranteed to whither away long before the actual tv outlives its usefulness. It's like the digital channel tuner on the same set -- useful in odd circumstances, but practically useless having long been long surpassed by cable tv.

Ridiculous, I thought this fad was over already.

This is a single platform, and in the video you see (naturally, young) people using either a laptop or an imac on it. It's ergonomically unsound unless you put an adjustable monitor stand on it. The brogrammer at the end talking about "productivity" caps off the video nicely.

Here's my equivalent. One box of the correct height (depends on person and access to boxes). To raise, place box and put laptop on box. To lower, remove box and put laptop on desk. To lower even further, remove desk and place laptop on floor. :-) Effect: The same, ergonomically. Cost: If you take lots of shipments, literally priceless.

> It seems like a uniquely north american woman phenomenon.

False. [1][2][3][4][5][6][...]

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/deannazandt/2013/02/01/germanys-...

[2] http://www.dw.de/opinion-how-sexist-is-germany/a-16555500

[3] http://interculturalmusings.blogspot.com/2013/07/germanys-bi...

[4] http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21571188-where-does-ger...

[5] http://freespeechdebate.com/fr/2013/06/twitter-free-speech-a...

[6] http://www.cafebabel.co.uk/society/article/sexism-on-europes...

[...] Google: "sexism germany". It would have taken you two seconds to do this before spouting off, but that would've required humility...

All this reminds me of when bozos start talking about "convergence" in the technology sphere. The US: doomed by middle management.

"i promise you that you don't program a computer with empathy no matter how hard you try"

Perhaps non-intuitively, I believe this is not true. You can tell the programmers who lack empathy -- they write code with no consideration for those who will use the end result or work with it later on. It requires empathy to make an effort to be understood and to be useful to others.

And in the case of anything with a UI, empathy shows up in spades (or doesn't). Just compare that app that seems to anticipate your every need and "just works" to whatever alternatives it's usually competing against. You can't just get away with it by copying whatever Apple does or having a cargo cult "design philosophy" -- you actually have to develop some kind of empathy for the people who use your product.

I always thought this "myth" was confined to C++ code (iterators) where there may in fact be code that does something analogous to what your "postincrement()" does.

Compilers are sometimes smart enough to remove the unnecessary operation in C++ (e.g. switch to ++x themselves), but I always use ++i for the same reason people simplify their usage of C in between sequence points --- it's an easy transformation, and why tempt fate?

I was hoping that the author would be complaining about this, but they didn't. That is unfortunate. The date something was written is a very important part of its context. This is one thing newspapers get right, and a lot of "web journalism" gets very very wrong. I've noticed this more and more as the web gets older and older -- I want to know the date something was published, and that information is really hard to come by a lot of the time.

If you remember the (gnu, ossp) pth library or any of the various cooperative multitasking equivalents for C, this is all the people raised on javascript, who started writing callback APIs for C#/ObjC discovering the same idea.

await is equivalent to "yield" or "wait" in most of those systems. The idea is to pause execution and jump back to the cooperative scheduler, which will eventually execute the function call in question. Once that call ends up with a result, the scheduler will then (eventually) resume your function with the result at the point you yielded. In the midst of all that, various other threads of control will be scheduled briefly -- for instance, the ones servicing sockets and whatnot. It's all single threaded and cooperative -- typically with an event system embedded.

Part of the callback "mess" is the result of the short memory of our industry. I was working with these kinds of systems in C code years and years ago. It didn't take long for most people to realize that you wanted to abstract the callbacks to the scheduler so you were writing your code instead fucking with the state machine mechanism used to implement the cooperative framework in question. No references to abstract CSP (or CPS :-)) ideas needed, really -- it's basic practical knowledge that seems to have been ignored over time.

This needs better examples. I find:

  v4si multiply_four(v4si a, v4si b) { return a*b; }

Much more readable, and just as portable. There's a typedef for v4si, of course, but you do that exactly once and then ignore it. The IR produced is identical, and therefore just as portable.

How are RMS & JWZ not famous for using emacs? I was expecting more people outside of the usual computer science & industry suspects.

The problem with this mantra is that it is technically true, but, as a negative, leaves out the rest of the world. For example, Correlation also does not imply non-correlation. This is vacuous, of course, but it illustrates the problem with using this kind of shorthand to quickly dismiss something rather than investigate it.

In truth, correlation does suggest causation, but not necessarily in the way one might expect. The WP article you linked goes into this.

All too often, this canard is trotted out to avoid thinking about where the causation might actually lay, rather than taking something seriously. It is precisely this that the shorthand is meant to prevent! Correlation does not imply causation, therefore you have to think carefully about the causation chain when considering two correlated events -- you can't just assume the causation isn't elsewhere, and you most definitely cannot assume it does not exist at all!

I don't get this. You mentioned in a subsequent comment that it's hard to be promoted inside google unless you "release", then go on to trash others by saying that Tools has unnecessary releases.

So is this something problematic about Tools, or about Google's culture in general? It sounds like you're criticizing the idea of using "releases" as a benchmark when inappropriate, yet you are disparaging someone else's work (what would you do?) because they have to adapt to the (dysfunctional?) corporate culture… Seems like making the best of a bad situation.

As far as relative status goes, "hackers" need to care a little bit less about other people's accomplishments or lack thereof. I've heard this kind of trash talk before (both direct and indirect) too many times in tech circles, and no matter how justified you may think it is… it just reflects badly on the person saying it.

These journals like to say they need the exclusivity, prestige and money to support their editorial process. Yet, given the exclusivity, money and prestige, they apparently don't do a great job.

On the other hand, is there a clear alternative? Is there a way to organize the review process such that the power of the editor is reduced, yet the quality is maintained? I'm not sure.

It seems like this would require non-anonymous open review and a some kind of rating/comment system for papers. It's possible that what ends up happening is that it creates more work for the reader in the same way that it takes effort to tease out a products true worth on Amazon. That might not be a bad thing at all.

Tangential question, not intended to the poo-poo this, which I think is great, but more of an information query: Do people actually find this better than upgrading your phone to do tethering and using an ultra book?

I attempted to use my iPad in exactly the way he described, and it was largely unsuccessful after about a week honeymoon period. I didn't even have that many requirements. SSH plus a web browser was sufficient.

The main issues I had related to the glossy iPad display, the crappy keyboard support (not all control keys supported), detached keyboard making lap use... awkward, and pointing to things on the screen (for cut and paste or rdp use) was tedious. Almost all of which were solvable in some indirect way, but kind of made the exercise pointless if you have the money to spend on an ultrabook.

You have to be very self-critical when proposing thought experiments. Typically, they end up having no connection with reality (attempts to make variables independent which really aren't), I'm not sure it's productive to think like this unless you're really super-guarded about your assumptions.

You're assuming a 1% absolute difference could easily exist given equal laws, enforcement, and penalties. If you say you're just asserting that for purposes of the experiment, you still can't say anything because the assertion may well be nonsense.

You're assuming you can tease it apart (e.g. existing laws and enforcement's influence on criminal culture) such that stats are "missing", it's not clear that you can. In fact, evidence (prohibition) more likely says you can't.

Please define radical, post-modern feminist. Thanks.

Aha, that was it. I was assuming you'd bound the length. :-)

This is a great talk, although maybe a little bit too precious (but this is common to a lot of [security] conference talks so I don't hold it against her). Pushing people towards using more formal methods to generate and accept protocols is always good.

That said, I thought the argument against length fields was somewhat.. weak. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the context. The question at the end was not answered satisfactorily. A protocol with a length field is most certainly deterministic, and if you go the other way and use a delimiter, escaping/encoding is the only way you're going to work with arbitrary user data. I would argue the length field is miles better. If someone injects bytes into your stream that match the protocol, your recognizer isn't going to save you, just the same way someone rewriting the length field is going to blow up.

What this talk seems to argue for is making the language simpler (e.g. context-free), so you can validate that the semantics are working as intended, but transferring arbitrary blobs of data is always going to be an issue as long as people enter random musings in text boxes that are rendered by Turing complete software. :-)

The point is not that you can represent it better. The point is that you can actually run it. You can't run the original notation (as such, we know languages that are close, of course).

I agree that the terser notation is better if you're just considering the mathematics in isolation. However, I also think that the true power of this kind of mathematics isn't made evident to people until you actually add some integers and make some lists.... from "nothing"... in a language you already know.

It's the same reason he doesn't use lisp or haskell, which are, obviously, vastly more appropriate. The idea is to illustrate something using something people have readily at hand. Once you have the concrete representation of the idea, you can work backwards to whatever notation you desire and forwards again using that notation, understanding that, yes, it has a basis in reality.

It's the same reason people draw 2d graphs to represent machine learning concepts instead of solely relying upon linear algebra notation. Humans are limited in that way: we have to gain some kind of appropriate intuition, and then we can work with the abstractions after that. No one is going to argue that js is an appropriate way to develop the mathematics -- it's just a way to make it more concrete for people, that's all.

I don't have any sources, but I suspect you are correct only up to the certain point. People are largely ok with mental illness which doesn't impose on them. Depression, yes, Schizophrenia, no.

My impression is that if the condition involves quiet angst, everyone will sympathize -- but if it's about real heavy duty craziness, no one wants to hear about it (or look at it or think about it, etc.).

This is the problem with being a "programmer" with no domain. This is sort of like the one true programming language debate ("blub") where people want to evaluate mathematical notation as to their qualitative worth completely devoid of any context.

Computer languages are not spoken languages. No one should accuse English of being "illogical" because it's redundant. It isn't as terse as mathematical notation because most people don't speak completely in mathematical notation. And it's all very logical, actually -- just not in the way you might expect. You might want to look into the effects of redundancy on transmission errors in communications before you pass judgement. :-)

You have to define what you mean by "Ebonics". The term is awful... :-)

According to the article's definition it doesn't sound like a crock at all. When a young person writes Spanish words and grammar in an English essay, sane people don't assume a degraded intelligence. We realize that this person is a native Spanish speaker. They are probably reasonably intelligent, but ignorant of certain normative rules of English and when and where a particular language/vocabulary is appropriate.

That all Ebonics is -- not unlimited acceptance of non-normative english in the wrong contexts, or teaching people to write with black slang (unless that's part of the point of essay). The whole point is to teach kids who speak a different dialect to code switch when writing, for example. These students are wrong to use certain verbal constructions in (formal) written english, but it's the language in a particular context that is wrong -- not the language itself.

"8 to 10 hours of reproductive work"

Yes, this would tire me out as well. :-)

Seriously, I've found that my normal schedule appears to be 7 hours solid, with a 1.5 hr nap, depending. Without an alarm, I wake up 7 hrs later on the dot (and can't get back to sleep), but then require a nap 8 hrs later to make it through the day. I cannot sustain 6 hrs and a 2-3 hr nap for any length of time (maybe a couple of days before I feel like crap).

I wonder how many different variations of these kinds of cycles there are among the population and how they vary from the 1st to the 3rd world.