alecdbrooks

I understand the advantages of higher single-core performance and the difficulties in parallelization. And yes, higher clock speeds mean better performance, all other things being equal.

But originally, you said 10 GHz, a record-breaking clock speed, would be advantageous. I replied to say that I doubt that, given the physical limits mentioned in the links I shared above. If what you originally meant was that processors with fewer cores and better raw performance per core is what you need, then I misunderstood.

>Have you ever coded a many-core application that runs on thousands of CPUs?

Nope. I admit you have more experience in that area than I do, but I don't really see why you brought it up.

>Nevertheless, for a specific domain I would need a really high speed single-core CPU.

Out of curiosity, which domain do you have in mind?

In what special domain do you envision such a high clock rate helping? Performance is only loosely connected to GHz[0]. If there is a case where clock rate trumps performance, I'm genuinely curious to know.

As processor architects are hitting fundamental physical limits when it comes to increasing clock speeds[1], it would probably take a team of world-class engineers, not a few disruption-minded startup founders, to create a 10GHz CPU. Such a chip would have extreme cooling and power demands and wouldn't necessarily perform well.

Cyrix doesn't seem like a great example, as it mostly competed with Intel on its budget chips, if Wikipedia is correct. I suspect the greater amount of low-hanging fruit in processor design made it easier for smaller companies to compete with Intel in the 90s.

[0]: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/04/ask-ars-whats-the-rel...

[1]: https://www.quora.com/Why-havent-CPU-clock-speeds-increased-....

http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/ngv50/why_have_c....

It was open-sourced at least two years ago[0]. I believe it hasn't been since to prevent gaming of the system, but I don't remember where I heard that.

[0] Based on this handy Github repository: https://github.com/wting/hackernews Original: http://arclanguage.org/install

Whenever something looks odd on Gwern's site, you can check his A/B testing article[0] to see if it's intentional. In this case, it's BeeLine Reader, his newest experiment[1]. The coloring or shading is supposed to help the eye follow the line as it saccades back and forth.

[0]: http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing [1]: http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#beeline-reader

While I might take a similar stand against the hypothetical coffee shop, I believe your analogy misses an additional point. Opposing gay marriage is favoring discrimination against gay people. It's detrimental to the organization and the community for someone apparently prejudiced against gay people to lead Mozilla, which appears to be the case.

We'll see how the promised inclusivity efforts go. If he's genuinely committed to inclusivity, great! For the moment, however, I have reservations.

>A world without Firefox and without Firefox OS and without our approach to putting the user at the center of cloud services instead of having users get pulled into walled gardens -- I think that would be a pretty dark world.

What Eich fails to see that for many people, we are only just moving away from the "dark world" where gay marriage is illegal. I appreciate his work for Mozilla, but it's double-think to advocate "inclusivity" while promoting narrow views of marriage.

Programming tools like Logo and HyperCard give children a chance to be creative, like writing and drawing do.

Beyond self-expression, children could learn the basics of

* interaction design ("'Click here' doesn't explain what a button does"),

* debugging ("It's okay to be wrong at first. I can just keep fixing it until it works")

* and geometry ("I can make a shape look more like a circle if I give it more sides").

EDIT: Here's a neat example of HyperCard's power: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=568. It's a bit complicated for a child, but it gives you a sense of HyperCard's potential.

From what I've heard of HyperCard and learning programming languages, children definitely could create a small game, short animation or interactive story. At nine years old, it would probably be rudimentary, but they could learn the basics. Without meaning to be rude, this question's like asking "What would you expect a nine year old to accomplish regarding writing and drawing?"

If you don't like that analogy, consider how children often learn the basics of woodworking or sewing through small projects that might not be useful or even be completed. Programming could work the same way.

As a professor emeritus at MIT, he doesn't. [0] It isn't clear how much faculty salaries contribute to the problem anyway, so I don't think it's hypocritical for professors critiquing tuition increases to accept a salary.

[0]: http://web.mit.edu/policies/2/2.3.html#sub1

As the article describes Snowden's decision to leak to journalists rather than directly to the public, this isn't a coherent argument. If we had "more Snowdens" we'd potentially need more journalists to cover the leaks.

Even if you had said "more Mannings" instead, how many people would have heard about anything she leaked without journalists?

It can't be that either, one person's account is 12 days old. Googling around, one source [0] suggested it counts only active days.

[0]: http://www.quora.com/Hacker-News/What-does-the-green-usernam...

I don't think I've ever done, that, actually. More often I realize I'm not sure enough of what I'm saying or I'm not sure it hasn't been covered by other commenters. Maybe it's a personal quirk, but I find it easier to go against groupthink in writing.

Sure, but I think it's useful to show that, even taking them at their word, metadata alone is dangerous.

I would imagine hosting vast amounts of crawl data and email would give them plenty of experience building inexpensive storage at scale. Giving people vast amounts of space for email also gives them plenty of data on how much space people are likely to actually use.

>At least in the U.S., lying by itself cannot be made illegal, as a violation of the First Amendment.

This isn't true. False statements of fact are a major exception to the First Amendment [0].

Besides perjury, you can prosecute people for defamation or libel. Usually it's a civil matter, but there's also criminal defamation. Finally, as WildUtah mentions below, making false statements is a crime.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_statements_of_fact

> Oddly, current mortality and morbidity statistics tend to show that the persons with longest expected lifespans are not persons with "normal" weight as defined by body mass index but rather persons who are (slightly) "overweight."

Does that mean "overweight" is a misnomer? Or are people wrong when they conflate a normal weight with a healthy weight?

>If Plus was an independent startup people would be crowning it the next Facebook and saying that Facebook better watch its back.

People have higher expectations for Google than for an unknown startup. Google has an audience of 425 million Gmail users [0] to market new services to, after all. It's unreasonable to expect every Google product to be Gmail, but that's where the bar's been set.

[0]: http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/28/gmail-now-has-425-million-u...

> Who do you think portrays them on tv and in movies? Fake women? Give me a break.

Oh, I had forgotten actresses write their own roles and pick their own wardrobes. And since most producers are women [0], most directors are women, most writers are women[1] and most people behind the scenes are women [2], I don't know what I was thinking. You're absolutely right: Men really have no influence on the process at all.

/sarcasm

>>When a man draws or designs a female character with "sexy" clothing, it's likely sexualizing that character for male viewers to ogle. When a woman decides to dress that way, it's personal expression.

>I like how if a man does it, it's sexist, but if a woman does it, it's "empowerment." I guess men aren't allowed to write empowered female characters. And yet, if they don't write them--that makes them misogynists, too.

I'm comparing a woman's personal choice to a man's choice of how women are portrayed. Men can dress as they wish. What they shouldn't do is objectify women.

[0]: http://www.screendaily.com/news/production/percentage-of-wom...

[1]: http://www.thewrap.com/tv/article/tv-writing-remains-white-m...

[2]: http://entertainment.time.com/2014/01/15/report-women-are-st...

Criticizing how fictional women are dressed is not the same as criticizing how real-life women are dressed. When a man draws or designs a female character with "sexy" clothing, it's likely sexualizing that character for male viewers to ogle. When a woman decides to dress that way, it's personal expression.

When I see feminist criticisms of how female characters are dressed, they're not criticizing three dimensional autonomous characters that happen to wear revealing clothes. They're criticizing usually stock characters that perpetuate stereotypes about women and objectify.

That being said, some feminists (or should that be "feminists"?) absolutely do police women's clothing choices, and that's just as wrong from them as it is from anyone else.

You've moved the goalposts. Neither ancestor comments nor the article were talking about founding a startup. But having conceded that programmers who start late are not necessarily at a disadvantage in terms of technical skill, you've changed the question to whether programmers are "fine and capable employees" or "more than that," apparently meaning success in the tech industry as a startup founder.

Younger people have advantages entrepreneurially speaking. But we shouldn't mistake that for technical skill by redefining hacking as "being a technical startup founder."

Well, did you read the article? It describes manual memory management, which is probably the most obvious reason C is lower level. It also talks about how strings are stored directly as arrays of characters as opposed to objects wrapping character arrays. Finally, C pointers are closer to how the computer operates (they're basically memory addresses) than anything in Python or Java.

What constitutes a "low level language" is a matter of perspective, however. From the perspective of writing binary instructions by hand, all three languages are "high level." ;)

I agree: I think the effect of HN commenting on its downtime is nonexistent for high-profile products from a giant company. Maybe if Slashdot picked up on downtime of a Google Labs product in 2004, you'd see an accelerated response, but that Google doesn't exist anymore.

The most I could see is some people from Google commenting here to give some slightly more technical than average canned response in order to flatter potential recruits. (And even that is so unlikely that I wouldn't assume any Google employees commenting here are doing that unless they gave the game away somehow.)

Crude fuzzing can be done on the command line using dd.

The command "dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1000 count=1" will spit out 1 KB of psuedorandom data you can pipe, POST or otherwise send to your application. (GNU's implementation lets you use "1K" as well.)

The reasons I wrote "he's acting as though sexism is a solved problem at YCombinator" are because none of his suggested solutions are about sexism at YC and this line: "More thoughtful people were willing to concede YC wasn't biased against women."

Edit: He is willing to do more about the problem generally, and I give him credit for that.

"Nobody can ever account for all bugs. It's the original sin doctrine of the programming community."

I'm not saying Graham should drop everything until every last bias is gone. I'm saying he shouldn't act as though sexism is a solved problem at YCombinator just because the percentage of female founders is up and it has women as partners.

>And what exactly is wrong with the "I have black friends" defense? Are you trying to say that pg is friends with someone in spite of his supposed hateful nature? That he's somehow looked past the person's "shortcomings"?

The critics I've read aren't saying pg has a hateful nature. They're saying that he hasn't fully accounted for his unconscious biases.

Given that everyone's friends have actual shortcomings, it doesn't seem a stretch to say that people are friends with people they imagine to have shortcomings because of an unconscious bias.

Just to be clear, R doesn't ever use the same operator for both, it uses == for comparison like C and Python. That being said, extra differentiation is a bonus.

I agree, I don't think SO would benefit from disabling voting on old questions. Don't you want to encourage people to write answers that are useful long after the fact?

The only benefit would be preventing the kind of bullying the OP. It would curtail systematic downvoting of past answers out of spite. But it's an extreme response to what I understand to be a rare problem.

>"Indeed I went from the top 4% of contributors at my time of departure to the top 3%"

>OMG, I didn't realize this issue was so serious.

It's actually a fairly big jump. If you look at a distribution of Stack Exchange users[0], it follows a power law distribution, where many users have few points and a handful have a lot[1]. Once you reach the 96th percentile, it takes a fairly large jump in reputation to get to 97.

If I ran Stack Exchange, this might bother me because it suggests that many high-reputation users are no longer contributing. (Otherwise, other contributors would overtake the OP as they gain after-the-fact upvotes plus upvotes from new answers.) An alternate possibility is that the OP wrote answers that are unusually long-lived, garnering enough extra upvotes to make up for his lack of posting.

(All of this is not to pick on you. I just thought this was an interesting statistical point.)

Finally, it looks like percentile is calculated based on users with more than 200 or something similar. Otherwise, the OP would be in the 99.9th percentile based on his rank and the total number of users.

[0]: http://imgur.com/a/bfcSl

Data: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/15710...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law

EDIT: Here's a better distribution of users' reputations: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/90233/repu....

"The Drug War is Evil" is actually just as bad of a title as "Cocaine is Evil." This article is about how buyers of cocaine support a system that has caused (according to the author) millions of deaths, not about government policy's role. The title "The Drug War is Evil" is appealing because it's 1) correct and 2) somewhat relevant, but it's not actually what the article's about.