Hacker News Reader

kartDon Uber’s Search for New C.E.O. Hampered by Deep Split on Board

Reposting my comment, because I don't think enough ire has been directed at Uber's board...

Possibly the most incompetent board of directors in the past decade. Can't reign Travis in, couldn't avoid all of this by forcing Travis to get an adult COO like Sandberg, fire him after he takes a break to mourn his moms death. They should all resign as well. A boards job is to reign in the CEO's bad tendencies. Really what have any of them accomplished by being on the board? Is there anything they can point to? And on top of all of that, their busy leaking news instead of picking a CEO...

kartDon Lack of cohesion in Uber's search for a new CEO

kartDon How does increased stock price affect capital

It does, thanks. So what would be a simple way to find out if Amazon, Tesla etc are getting capital. Would it be digging through their quarterly prospectus?

kartDon The Rise of Python for Embedded Systems

Cython is wasteful with lots of memory allocations, which are expensive in embedded systems. Also GC is not a good fit for real time. Something like micro python is far more suited for embedded systems

Video:https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EvGhPmPPzko

kartDon The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans

Credit cards have ridiculous interest rates (like 20%+ min.). It's far better to take out a loan and pay your credit dues since the loan will be at a far better rate (at least half).

Why would any sane person do this (pay min. balance)?

kartDon AMD Threadripper prices undercut Intel's Core i9 by as much as $1,000

AMD screwed up when they decided to make something similar to the P4 arch (high clock speed, long pipeline) after they spent the previous 5-7 years beating it using high IPC, lower clock speed cores. I still don't get why they did this...

kartDon Uber Backers Discuss Stock Sale to SoftBank, Others

Am I missing something?

According to this (Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/technology/uber-limits-lo...)

Uber has $7.2B sitting in the bank, with losses reducing ($708M) in the first 3 months of 2017. I'm sure they can get profitable or break-even in that time.

kartDon AMD Threadripper prices undercut Intel's Core i9 by as much as $1,000

http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49

TLDR; Intel purposely chooses slower code gen paths for AMD processors in ICC.

kartDon Sizing Up Servers: Intel's Skylake-SP Xeon versus AMD's EPYC 7000

But the article states that they didn't have enough time to tune (they had the chip for just a week compared to 2 weeks for Intel) and a more detailed look is forthcoming from Anandtech, so it might be wise to wait for that.

kartDon Sizing Up Servers: Intel's Skylake-SP Xeon versus AMD's EPYC 7000

I believe Lisa Su's email is lisa.su at amds website. You should try writing her an email. She's from an academic background and may be willing to do something. Unlikely to work, but if you never ask the answer is always no.

kartDon Sizing Up Servers: Intel's Skylake-SP Xeon versus AMD's EPYC 7000

One difference this time around is that AMD can make a good business just selling to Apple(servers), Facebook, AWS, GCP and Azure. As long as they hit their use cases they can create a good, sustainable revenue base. They also have a semi-custom division for tailoring their offerings, which the big cloud providers would definitely expect at the volumes they purchase in. Also, it's a good tool for them to use as leverage when negotiating with Intel.

kartDon Snap falls to IPO price

Yes, but it's filled at regular price (I bought SNAP at $24), it's just that you put in the trade previous day (in the case of SNAP). It's more of a convenience feature, you won't get the stock at the pre-IPO value ($17 in SNAP's case).

kartDon Snap falls to IPO price

I'm aware, but I'd like to keep the as few accounts as possible. Should simplify transfers and customer service.

kartDon Snap falls to IPO price

Thanks for the info, I think my next bank account is going to be with Charles Schwab ( I was waffling between Ally and Charles Schwab, but this is a useful feature for me and a good step up from Robinhood).

kartDon Bitcoin's Price Surge Is Making Hobby Mining Profitable Again

I think this article is mistaken. People are mining Ethereum causing GPU prices to spike 2-3x. Eth is designed to use a lot of memory so GPU mining is always viable.

GPU prices: https://camelcamelcamel.com/search?sq=geforce+1060

Mining centric cards are being released as well: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11607/cryptocurrency-mining-ca...

kartDon Learn Python 3 the Hard Way

Hardly matters since 2.7.xx are all maintenance releases and practically no features or performance improvements

kartDon Learn Python 3 the Hard Way

Your last point is slightly misleading, you're comparing Python 3.6 (2016ish) with Python 2.7(2008), it better be faster

kartDon Learn Python 3 the Hard Way

It's for people who can't code

kartDon Most Waymo Patent Claims Dropped in Autonomous Car Fight with Uber

Umm, Waymo has an early rider program... https://waymo.com/apply/

I don't see how they have no interest, none of their other projects were upgraded to separate company status. Also, they've been working on it for 10+ years so it's outlasted most of their other "projects"

kartDon Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)

Their comment section since last year has devolved into Reddit style one-liners (especially political articles). The articles are really average these days.

The one I'm really worried about is Anandtech, the articles are still excellent but they're so understaffed(A10 chip deep dive was canceled, behind on Mac reviews)

kartDon Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment

Heads are already rolling

https://500.co/making-changes-at-500/

https://medium.com/@sacca/i-have-more-work-to-do-c775c5d56ca...

kartDon David Goyer and Josh Friedman Adapting Isaac Asimov's Foundation for TV

Where does "for you" occur? I can't seem to place it...

kartDon Launch HN: Feather (YC S17), painless furniture rental for people who move a lot

Website please?

EDIT: https://rentfeather.com/

kartDon Seattle’s higher minimum wage is actually working fine

Yes, please charge me higher menu prices. I shouldn't be responsible for your employees livelihood

kartDon Seattle’s higher minimum wage is actually working fine

Frankly, I'll be happy when the US gets out of this mandatory tipping culture BS.

kartDon Six contenders to be Uber's new CEO

But they have $7.2B in cash, so they can "afford" it

kartDon The Size of iPhone’s Top Apps Has Increased by 1,000% in Four Years

What's also really irritating is the need to update every 2 weeks. I feel like my phone is wasting non-trivial battery and cycles because of shitty software development practices. Why does Facebook (Google, Uber et al are all guilty as well) update every 2 weeks? Your shitty development practices shouldn't be reducing the lifespan of my device.

I mean I thought the interview torture would have some effect on code quality, but jeez all I get is a battery hog that needs a new version every 2 weeks

/rant

kartDon Texas Instruments’ Biggest Blunder: The TMS9900 Microprocessor

Someone who is familiar with the 70s and 80s will have to chime in, but I'm not sure how popular it was with assembly writers then (I don't think it was).

kartDon Chai Wallahs of India

South India is coffee country (although you still get both). I'm a Tea fan (addict?) but filter coffee is also something I really like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_filter_coffee).

kartDon Texas Instruments’ Biggest Blunder: The TMS9900 Microprocessor

It didn't, it's ugly because of backwards compatibility. It was cheap(transistor and engineering-wise) for Intel to add instructions in the 80's to 90's timeframe since it reduced instruction size, so they added a tonne of them. Now it looks ugly, but Intel can't reduce it because some obscure program may break.