Hacker News Reader

iamon Tesla's New Model S 70D Adds All-Wheel Drive and 240 Mile Range

Tesla has an aggressive sales target of 55,000 vehicles by end of year for 2015, which is above its existing pace of quarterly unit sales

Is this a typo, or are they really selling this few cars? Must be the SF bay area bubble, I see a Model S all the time!

iamon A C error handling style that plays nice with C++ exceptions

This definitely dampens the usefulness.

It's like the author knew it was a bad idea too (he put noexcept(false) on the destructor; without which in C++11 the program terminates immediately when an exception is thrown from destructor).

If there's some way to avoid terminating when there's a double exception in the destructor, that would be good to hear!

One simple way I can think of is to reuse the same variable instead.

   ThrowOnError throw_on_error;
   std::cout << libfoo_create_widgets(1, &c1, throw_on_error) << libfoo_create_widgets(2, &c2, throw_on_error);

iamon Slabbed-or-not: Detect if your VPS container is running under a hypervisor

Out of curiosity how would you reimplement this file in bash? https://github.com/kaniini/slabbed-or-not/blob/master/xen-de...

In particular, the fact that it's using inline asm directly (for cpuid, ud2, some others). Maybe with 'as' but that's not exactly pure bash (and I suspect not embedding it in C would need a non-trivial main function anyway).

Reading an arbitrary memory address (for the cpuid scans) might be a bit tricky too, though it could be doable with /proc/$PID/mem.

iamon Google outed me

That sounds like it could be a bug, you should consider filing it on https://code.google.com/p/android

iamon Issue 62938 – Barometer driver hangs and kills accelerometer on its way

It would be a lot easier to get their attention if there was an actual 'adb bugreport' attached to the bug.

There's very little context on what the bug is and how to reproduce it besides some vague references to PressureNET (which means very little to someone who hasn't used that before).

iamon Google outed me

Have you tried turning off Contacts synchronization in Settings > Accounts ?

iamon Typing.io: Typing Practice for Programmers

I found this really fun, I tried half the languages there. But why do the lower level languages like C/C++ have actual logic in them (e.g. if/else/||/&& ) while the higher level languages just have module/class definitions?

It's not exactly an apple-to-oranges comparison. Like I just got 100+ wpm in Ruby but what's the point of feeling good about that when it's just typing out a list of symbols over and over again?

iamon A C++ Immutable String class

It's immutable but it defines swap? That seems.. odd.

iamon Steam Family Sharing

This isn't any different from sharing the password with your family members (who you should trust anyway, right?). Why not make it more useful and allow the person you share with to play games from your library at the same time you're playing?

(but different games. if I want to play TF2 and the family member wants to play Dragon Age, I don't see why that shouldn't be possible!)

Heck, you can already play single/multi player games simultaneously just by sharing passwords and using offline mode. Color me unexcited.

Here's even a quick config file change you can make so that your Steam always starts in offline mode and doesn't force-logout the other person already logged in. http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25474... (tried this with my dad and it works great as long as he doesn't need to patch).

iamon Beautiful Native Libraries

Great post, very informative!

But why recommend changing operator new/delete by using a macro instead of privately inheriting a class that does that?

iamon Exo: Protein Bars made from Cricket Flour

I was wondering what the difference in ingredients was, so I put together this list from their sites

Chapul (Chaco Bar) ingredients:

  * Dates
  * Peanuts
  * Toasted Oats
  * Chocolate Chips
  * Walnuts
  * Agave Nectar
  * Cricket Flour
  * Gryllus
  * Flax Seed Meal
  * Salt

Exo (Cacao Nut) ingredients:

  * Raw Almonds
  * Dates
  * Coconut
  * Honey
  * Cricket Flour
  * Raw Cacao Nibs
  * Raw Cacao Powder
  * Vanilla Extract
  * Sea Salt

iamon Intel Core i7-4770K Review: Haswell Is Faster; Enthusiasts Yawn

Can someone please shed some light on this relatively recent APU race? I understand it seems like a good idea for OpenCL, but when they increase their APU performance while actually stagnating their CPU performance I am just completely lost (as is the case with the i7-4770K).

What is the market for desktop CPUs where the desktop buyers don't also have dedicated video cards which can do a almost a magnitude better job than the APU?

iamon The AI Systems of "Left 4 Dead" [pdf]

Oh, I don't think the game is not replayable, I had a lot of fun playing it and L4D2. I just don't think it was at all obvious accomplished their goals with the director AI that they set out to. Hence "replayability section" (directly referring to the PDF)

iamon US Navy to pay $1M to make Android more secure

Seems like a great idea. I expect most of their contributions will make it back to open source via AOSP, and people will be able to run their own secure non-proprietary versions of Android.

iamon The AI Systems of "Left 4 Dead" [pdf]

Great stuff, have to disagree on the "replayability" section though. There were only 2-3 tier 2 weapon spawns on the entire map, the crescendos were pretty much always in the same spot (this was a bit better in L4D2), and so on. After the first 10 times every map felt the exact same.

iamon BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

I think that's what made the original BitTorrent popular. The open protocol. They really need to do the same here if they want this to take off.

iamon How easy it is to Socially Engineer Microsoft Skype Support

EA's Origin has similar problems, it's pretty easy to social engineer someone's account (tech support will reset your password and your secret security question) and then they can buy a bunch of games before you notice.

Apparently the security hole was that you just needed to provide the email and birthdate to the tech support, then they'd go ahead and reset your info.

At least there's no way to transfer the goods onto another account like there is on Steam (yet).

The worst part about all this is when you ask the tech support how your password got reset, they always say it's your fault (you got a virus, keylogger, etc) and never that it's theirs (social engineering, database lost, etc). Guess you gotta keep face.

iamon Donating my Xbox

Has it ever occurred to the OP that maybe the Xbox 360 was such a huge success precisely because of the culture of the employees there?

iamon Facebook Lost a Great Engineer

Culture fit is more generally whether your personality is a mesh with everyone else's personality. It's typically a blanket over everything non-coding in an interview.

For example..

Positives:

  * Person is a go getter, gets things done, doesn't get blocked
  * Person is meticulous, pays careful attention to detail
  * Person is a good communicator, articulating explanations eloquently

Negatives:

  * Person stumbles around an incorrect solution until hints are given
  * Person jumps to conclusion without considering the bigger picture (or the edge cases)
  * Person doesn't seem to get it, or at least can't explain himself/herself well

---------

And this can then be inferred from the technical "coding" question, or in more traditional companies they will ask direct questions (usually known as "behavioral" questions) that focus on just those personality traits.

To give a particular example, at Amazon the "culture fit" of a candidate is how well they adhere to the company's leadership principles:

http://www.amazon.com/Values-Careers-Homepage/b?ie=UTF8&...

iamon 3D Real-time Unigine Crypt demo (WebGL)

This has quite a way to go. I'm running Firefox 18 on my Radeon HD 6970 card (high end gaming grade) and there's quite a bit of stuttering every few seconds.

Maybe the javascript garbage collection?

iamon How Valve made Team Fortress 2 free-to-play

I feel like everything that's happened to TF2 is just a sneak peek into what will happen once Valve ships Defense of the Ancients 2.

The question is, how will they balance a hardcore gaming community which hates paying to get better (stats-wise) items vs monetizing F2P? Will they charge only for cosmetic items, or will they drive away their core Dota fanbase?

iamon Mono's Making Money

Ngen still requires the CLR to be present though.

iamon Dianne Hackborn responds again about android graphics

That might have been true before, but my understanding is that the newer mobile GPUs (coming out now, 2012, etc) have pretty much free context switching. Or so the vendors like to claim.

Even if it's not true, shouldn't Google pushing for the GPU drivers to be fixed? This is a pretty obvious huge flaw [that has been pretty much solved on Desktop].

iamon GCC 4.7 adds transactional memory extensions for C/C++

I was hoping for more information on how they implement it.. there's nothing in there about which hardware facilities they use, and they say that at worst STM is a global lock for the process.

Hopefully they're at least using some kind of compiler analysis to only use the same lock across transactions if it's touching the same memory addresses (pessimistically of course)?

iamon Please Poach Me

Unless they happen to read your resume and see that your experience directly lines up with what your company/team is working on?

iamon Asynchronous UIs - the future of web user interfaces

Good thing that there's local storage that JS apps could be using to cache outgoing emails until confirmed they were sent.

iamon Asynchronous UIs - the future of web user interfaces

Yes, this is so blindingly obvious that I'm surprised we don't see it happen more often.

It doesn't block the UI and yet it still gives the user an indication when the actions are in progress/completed.

iamon Google Music now available to everyone in the US

I requested an invite a few weeks ago and got in the next day

iamon Steam loses user database

Thanks for the link to an open source app. I find it hard to believe people would trust proprietary apps to store their passwords.

iamon Microsoft may halt development work on Silverlight plugin after next release

They should've stuck with Silverlight as a rich javascript library (similar to v1), and used the Silverlight CoreCLR to power the javascript JIT in IE, providing a superior user and/or development experience compared to other [desktop] browsers.

Of course, it's entirely too sensible to have actually happened. Instead the IE team went off and wrote their own JIT for IE7/8/whatever and are still playing catch up to Chrome.

At this time about 2 years ago they did have JS running on CLR and it was 2x faster than any browser out there.