Wow! That's actually really amazing, thanks for posting that!
2,951 karma · joined August 28, 2011
Now imagine you're speaking to someone who read this post. That person is just as ignorant as our big-mouthed friend, but they don't even know it. They read some post, learn a new term or two, and go out into the world not knowing that what they just read contains no real knowledge whatsoever. A post like this does a huge disservice to that person, because not only does it leads them into ignorance, it actually makes them less empowered to rise above it.
Some things aren't consumable in seconds. You either put in the effort to learn something properly, or you don't and content yourself with not knowing.
Any article claiming to explain P vs NP without so much as mentioning nondeterministic and deterministic Turing machines is meaningless.
http://cdn1.tnwcdn.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2014/01/...
Business needs on the server side do not change terrifically fast. The things we needed to do on the server side has certainly changed over the past ten years, but the changes have been gradual. I struggle to name a single server-side upheaval as violent as the release of iOS or the demise of flash was to client-side. As a result, things are pretty well-understood. Thanks to POSIX and *nix, the operating system interface has been effectively static for at least a decade. Concurrency is hard to wrap your head around as a developer, but once you do you find that the actual tools you use have achieved something resembling stability. Persistence is one place that's actually seeing interesting changes with various database platforms coming into prominence, but if all else fails, you can get a decent amount of mileage out of good old SQL.
Client side programming, UI programming in particular, is where an application's most immediate value resides. As a result, it's where the most competition and development takes place, and so its interfaces and programming techniques are most changeable. Consumer-facing platforms come and go at a consumer-market pace. Platform providers like Google, Apple, and the W3C are constantly struggling to keep ahead of the manic pace both of of consumers' expectations regarding features and businesses' demand for capabilities. As a result, there are no time-honored abstractions like the Unix file system, or SQL, but rather a roiling soup of constant upheaval.
What's the takeaway? Rather than bemoaning the lack of stability in the client programming world, come to terms with the fact that you as a developer are going to have speed up. So long as client-side magic and consistency is a source of competitive advantage for applications, the state of the client-side programming art will continue to change rapidly. Things will get easier and harder as time goes by, but change and inconsistency are the natural order of this world.
I understand if you don't want to post this stuff online, but you're not giving people much to work with.
As background, a typical graphics stack looks like this, from bottom to top. All components are designed, implemented, and maintained by the GPU manufacturer:
1. Graphics card is presented to the kernel through some mechanism. On Android/ARM, this was as a device memory mapped into a hardware-specified set of addresses. This layer provides the computational component.
2. A kernel driver whose function is to accept GPU code and funnel it down to the device through the appropriate mechanism. This layer provides the input/output mechanisms necessary to communicate with the device, and contains knowledge about the communication protocol the card follows.
3. An OpenGL driver. This is basically a compiler than accepts sequences of OpenGL calls, and translates them down to the hardware-level implementation. Most knowledge of the computational details of the GPU's architecture lives here.
Of these layers, only the kernel driver, number 2, was open source when I worked with it. This is because it links into the Linux kernel, and so needs to be GPL (Not certain about this, please feel free to correct me.) In any case, this component does not contain much or any "secret sauce," so it's fairly safe to share.
The rest of the components, however, are closed source. The reasons for this are:
1. The GPU hardware's architectural design is a trade secret. Even the instruction set architecture is closed source. The reason for this is that much of the competitive advantage a GPU manufacturer might enjoy stems from the speed (and power efficiency) of its GPU architecture. Publishing the architecture would basically provide the GPU maker's competitors access to valuable intellectual property: a lot of research goes into designing a good ISA, and you could probably tell a lot about how the device functions if you had access to the ISA spec.
2. Following this rationale, keeping the ISA secret allows the manufacturer a great deal of flexibility. They have no reason to worry about backwards compatibility because they own the product, so they can do whatever they want with it: add instructions, remove instructions, change calling conventions, whatever.
For comparison, one of Intel's (many) strengths is its robust backward compatibility for its ISA. The basic outline of Intel's x86 ISA have been unchanged for decades, and when they do roll out changes, they're additive rather than subtractive, and they take years to fully roll out. Secrecy presumably allows GPU makers to turn things around as quickly as they feel necessary by freeing them of this backward compatibility constraint.
3. I'm less confident about this point, but I presume there are some tricks they do in implementing the OpenGL library driver. Wherever there are multiple competing implementations of something, you're guaranteed to have tricks the various implementors are proud of.
tl;dr: Keeping drivers secret allow manufacturers to obfuscate their architectural implementation, protecting their intellectual property and affording them a measure of flexibility when they want to make changes to it.
> aprilthemoo: are you autistic or something StoneCypher?
Quality discussion right there.
Enough gushing, now some bug reports:
"read -r random_line < <(sort -R file)" yields "syntax: expecting filename or fd (position 22)"
"nc HOST PORT | tee movie.mp4 | mplayer -" I can hover over movie.mp4, but I can't scroll down the see the description without losing the emphasis on that path. I'd suggest letting the user click on the portion, or perhaps a long-hover effect?
Is this a PR stunt? Yes and no. On one hand it's a PR stunt in that it teases people with pie-in-the-sky products that don't exist yet.
On the other hand, this is a completely new product built on completely new technology that most people don't have any experience with. Releasing this sort of stuff is delicate because people need to be acclimated to the existence of the technology before they can be comfortable with it. This release is the very first step in that process. As the project matures, I predict they will lead the launch with a great deal of public-relations-type announcements like this.
- I'd be willing to bet that people won't react well to this sort of thing popping up in their existing news feeds without their explicit permission. For instance, I'd love to see Facebook or Twitter introduce this as a ranking signal, but I can't see that resulting in meaningful discussion without some careful tuning.
- This being hacker news, the first thing that comes to mind is "let's found a startup that does this." I'd seriously love to see this turn into a product of some sort. It would face something of an uphill struggle for adoption, but it might not be so bad. One major feature of the "ideal customer" is already lined out: interest in or willingness to tolerate dissenting opinions. Synthesis of opposing views into a new one correlates strongly with education, so that's a group you can reasonably target. College students are into this sort of stuff, so you could go after them. Personally, I think this has potential as a space.
- Gathering existing data for this sort of thing could be difficult. Access to significant amount of social network data is a must, especially if you will want to perform clustering-type analysis. My hunch is that there may be a way to make this happen without a large quantity of data, but nothing obvious or market-tested comes to mind.
Meanwhile, 23andMe went ahead and began marketing and selling their product, despite the FDA's concerns.
Relevant quotes:
> Most of these uses have not been classified and thus require premarket approval or de novo classification, as FDA has explained to you on numerous occasions.
> However, to date, your company has failed to address the issues described during previous interactions with the Agency or provide the additional information identified in our September 13, 2012 letter for (b)(4) and in our November 20, 2012 letter
> To date, 23andMe has failed to provide adequate information to support a determination that the PGS is substantially equivalent to a legally marketed predicate for any of the uses for which you are marketing it; ...
> ...we have proposed modifications to the device’s labeling that could mitigate risks and render certain intended uses appropriate for de novo classification.
> As part of our interactions with you, including more than 14 face-to-face and teleconference meetings, hundreds of email exchanges, and dozens of written communications, we provided you with specific feedback on study protocols and clinical and analytical validation requirements, discussed potential classifications and regulatory pathways (including reasonable submission timelines), provided statistical advice, and discussed potential risk mitigation strategies...
> Thus, months after you submitted your 510(k)s and more than 5 years after you began marketing, you still had not completed some of the studies and had not even started other studies necessary to support a marketing submission for the PGS.
The FDA is a regulatory agency, which implies that their mission is less about intimidation and more about protecting the public good. Hence the more open tone, I suspect.
Once you take yourself out of your own head, and consider people for whom price is important, who don't demand products outside what the browser provides, who don't have a tremendous amount of experience, and who don't demand a particularly intense experience from their computer, the Chromebook looks a lot more attractive.
The tl;dr of it is: don't assume the entire market is like you.
Connection and passion for an industry is not a prerequisite for success. Passion comes and goes, both in intimate relationships and professional ones. Passion in your life is something you nurture and develop over time, and with the right set of mental habits and the appropriate circumstances, you can fall in love with something after you've chosen it. I tend to suspect anyone who discounts business people from the tech industry of not fully understanding what business people do and the value that they provide, and so defaulting to gut instinct based on projections of their own feelings.
As for hoping that tech can survive this dilution effect, what is tech? Do you mean the technology community, which for the most part is very segregated between engineering and sales and operations? An influx of business-minded people isn't likely to affect the engineering side of the community. If you mean technology companies, they will continue to hire the talent they need, and if anything a greater supply of talented individuals is a good thing.
The solution here is to carefully and consistently remind people, especially children, about this.