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tarblog

119 karma · joined January 16, 2013

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tarblog··on Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time
Do you have a source on this? Even one about the market in general? I wasn't aware of this practice before now.
tarblog··on Swift 2.2 Released
Monomorphisation is the name of the technique of producing a different version of the code for each set of type parameters that are used in the program. C++ and Rust use monomorphisation instead of doing runtime checks because they're trading off slightly bigger binaries for greater speed.

By not doing runtime checks you get to skip that work at runtime, obviously, but you also get to enable other optimizations like inlining the monomorphised version.

tarblog··on Julie Rubicon
The burden of proof that facebook can see months into the future would be on the poster. No evidence is needed to simply disbelieve this.
tarblog··on AI generated music to improve focus, relaxation and sleep
>We take the data we get and process it for later use

What data do you collect/use to make the music?

tarblog··on AI generated music to improve focus, relaxation and sleep
Do you have any science to back those claims up? What are you basing it on?
tarblog··on AI generated music to improve focus, relaxation and sleep
My first thought was Lumosity [1]. I'd love for these claims to be real, but I'm just not willing to believe claims like these until I see a significant result in a randomized controlled trial.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumosity#Effectiveness

tarblog··on Yahoo is shutting down about half of its content verticals
Do you have a suggestion for a replacement for "monad"? It's always been such an opaque term to me, even as I began to get a grasp of it.
tarblog··on A Message to Our Customers
Professional ethics of software engineering is definitely something we're going to have to grapple with more and more. Another aspect is being asked to use Dark Patterns in a UI or build a skinner box into a game or app. There's evidence that these things do harm to people and having a professional organization that could help stand up to such things could be part of a solution.
tarblog··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2016)
Tip: include the text "San Francisco" or "SF" instead of "s.f.", it makes searching for your post more obvious.
tarblog··on Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World
I think you're on the right track.

The way I remember it: the product was still overwhelmingly better than everything else. Missing copy&paste was an "oh well" compared to owning an iPhone in 2007.

tarblog··on Two Weeks of Rust
You shouldn't expect quantum computers to bring a "free-lunch" speedup the way that clock-speed increases did for such a long time.
tarblog··on Two Weeks of Rust
I would define the term "high-level language" to mean that it's possible to write programs in the language without needing to worry about the specific hardware that the program is running on.

I would consider systems programming to be things like writing operating systems, drivers, high-performance native applications (for many difference definitions of high-performance), and databases.

I consider rust to be a high-level language and I further consider it to be suitable for systems programming using my definitions.

However, I don't consider go to be suitable for a lot of systems programming tasks because it has a significant runtime system that includes a garbage collector. Just because they describe themselves as a "systems programming language" doesn't mean that I believe them (at least as far as I understand that term). That said, there are certain applications that work fine with GC, and in those cases it can be a very nice way to achieve memory safety without programmer burden.

tarblog··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2016)
You have a typo in "Francisco"
tarblog··on Netflix socks detect when you've dozed off and pause your TV show
>has been in iOS since forever

Granular permissions have only been in iOS since version 6.0, which came out 3 years ago. The first version of iOS was 8 years ago. For a feature that's "as common sense as it gets" we sure got along fine without it for half a decade.

tarblog··on Rust 1.5
You should become skeptical of languages that compile to C. I can't get into the details because I don't know them very well, but take a look a pcwalton's comment history for a fairly technical discussion of why it makes a poor compilation target.
tarblog··on Re:work – tools and lessons to make work better
Why? Because their applicant pool is too small? Or because the cost of doing that many interviews is so steep? Or something else?

I intuitively had the exact opposite reaction: most companies can't afford to hire any bad people, but large companies with lots of resources actually can. If google's rate of poor hiring was higher than average, they'd still survive, at least in the short term, because they're so large and profitable.

tarblog··on You're Eight Times More Likely to Be Killed by a Police Officer Than a Terrorist
...wait a second
tarblog··on Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
I'd guess that most are in the SF office, but I didn't know that had 29 other offices until 5 seconds ago.
tarblog··on New Windows 10 Devices From Microsoft
Wifi is not too slow for RAWs. I backed-up my entire library to the cloud over wifi. I would bet most people don't need to transfer their files on a fast enough timescale that wifi is too slow for them.
tarblog··on Free Lossless Image Format
I don't know, at this rate, in 9 days he'll need agreement from everyone in the world!
tarblog··on Introducing Brotli: a new compression algorithm for the internet
In the spec [1], they published the dictionary used in hexadecimal form. Can someone explain why there are so many 6's in the data?

For comparison here's a chart of hex character and approximate [2] number of occurrences.

(0 - 15k) (1 - 10k) (2 - 19k) (3 - 14k) (4 - 15k) (5 - 16k) (6 - 62k) (7 - 32k) (8 - 10k) (9 - 11k) (a - 11k) (b - 7k) (c - 8k) (d - 12k) (e - 20k) (f - 9k)

[1]: http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-alakuijala-brotli-05.txt [2]: counted with find-in-page, didn't bother to only search the dict

tarblog··on Nelson Rules
Small communities become smaller when certain people share similar interests. -Tarblog
tarblog··on A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory
Maybe, but there's strong evidence (from the field of macroeconomics) that allowing people to just receive money (rather than payments in kind) makes them even better off. Although you may fret about people using the money for bad things, in reality mostly they don't, but they are better at allocating resources than a central planner. Think of it this way, to the citizen who actually wants to be better off, would you rather be able to cut your spending in order to make a smart investment or not be able to do so?
tarblog··on Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
Would you mind posting more information about your experience? I'm interested.
tarblog··on U.S. Bans Trans Fat
I think the problem is more to with science journalism than the scientists themselves. I've seen so many headlines that read something like "Is X affecting Y?!" but then the story is something like "scientists published an article saying that there may be a link between X and Y."
tarblog··on Generating Magic cards using deep, recursive neural networks
Fair enough, but this card doesn't hinge on its combo ability. Imagine it in BW weenie with things like Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit.

Even the synergy with Fume Spitter is pretty great. :)

tarblog··on Generating Magic cards using deep, recursive neural networks
I'm not so sure this card is on cost.

My neural network is telling me that it's actually too good at 4 mana.

Don't forget about potential combos like having a bunch of zero cost creatures in your graveyard + anything else that triggers when you play a spell or when a creature enters the battlefield. But even without that, this is a card advantage machine.

tarblog··on Three months of Rust
Also, I'm confused by the word "aggressive" here. Could you elaborate please?
tarblog··on Three months of Rust
> C and C++ builds, usually measured in hours. Do you have a source or a story about this? I hadn't heard numbers like that before.
tarblog··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2015)
Please only post once per thread.
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