momerath

Agreed about maintenance, but yeah, CA registration is that much more.

I don't know where you get this idea; they talk a lot about the connections between columns and how they reinforce each other.

Cloud rendering is a fantasy for games on flat screens, because the latency is too high. To maintain 'presence' and not get sick in VR, the motion-to-photons latency has to be _consistently_ <20ms.

360 video for VR is certainly a bandwidth-hog, but I think that could well be offset by most VR content being game-like, where, though the game might weigh in at 40G, you download it once, and spend 40 hours in it, vs a 4k movie at the same size, which lasts 2 (and which you'd likely re-stream if you watched it again). In other words, widespread VR use, even with next-gen hardware, could actually lead to a reduced demand for bandwidth.

Unfortunately, I think you're correct.

Anecdote: I used Erlang, over the course of several years, for very-high-level bot behavior and multi-player mission control, where performance was much less important than the things Erlang provides, but I still had issues with it. Nonetheless, I felt it had given me great leverage, and I thanked Joe Armstrong profusely, when I met him at a conference. Later at the con, I asked a panel whether there were active efforts at improving performance, perhaps with a JIT. They seemed to take it as an attack, and suggested that if I need performance, I should use another language. I mostly write in Clojure now.

I don't have time to read through the thread today, but I did before the Rift kickstarter was announced, and my impression has always been that the software-distortion-in-compensation-for-simpler-optics[1] idea was already out there when Carmack chimed in.

1. Allowing the screen to be much closer, drastically improving practically achievable FOV.

Here's the thread: http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=140&t=14777

Cyberneticists are not ignorant of your viewpoint. You may be right 'ultimately', but you might find your views refined if you actually dug into the arguments. Stafford Beer addresses "variety reduction" in the first of these lectures:

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1973-cbc-massey-lectures-d...

Edit: as a quick software-design analogy, I think Cybernetics gets labeled "top down" design, by people who think there are only top-down and bottom-up to choose from. It's more of a middle-out strategy.

De jure, you're right; de facto, we're fucked.

I don't know a lot about chess, but I would try picking several prolific players with what seem to you to be different styles, and training a classifier to identify the player, as an experiment in viability.

Sanders would also seek to double the capital gains rate for the richest 2%, and close various loopholes.

Thank you! I looked pretty hard for a OneTab-like extension for FF about a year ago, and couldn't find one. It's the one thing I really miss about Chrome; making my own was on my TODO list.

I don't know what you mean by "major city," but I look in Milwaukee every six months or so. There simply aren't any "independent ISPs" here with remotely comparable speeds or prices.

The use of Doom3 in the Kickstarter (I remember feeling like Carmack had given his seal of approval), definitely provides Zenimax with ammo, and I agree, it could be ugly.

Like so many other (game) programmers, Carmack is a hero of mine, and the bias runs deep. In reading the complaint, though, I was starting to feel for Zenimax, but when the "$500 worth of optics" phrase started appearing, they lost me. The kit, as described in the thread where Carmack and Palmer first interacted in public, was to be a display, display-controller, and some sort of ski-goggle based contraption you could put together. And, iirc, $300 was the price discussed.

But I think the really key point, missing from this complaint, is that, before Carmack (and Abrash at Valve) improved on the Rift, it had stirred up interest because of the concept of using simple, _cheap_, optics, that would allow the display to be closer to the eyes (wide FOV), and pre-correcting for the resulting distortion in software.

Carmack and Abrash provided some secret sauce that I'm sure will be vital to the sense of presence that will drive broad appeal, but the breakthrough was saying "so what if the optics massively distort the image; we'll fix it in software". From what I've read, I'm pretty sure that wasn't Palmer's idea to begin with either, but he was the first one to run with it.

I owned a BeBox and used it as my desktop for several years, til it stopped posting. The use of its relational-database-like filesystem, for email and organizing my music, was such a joy.

I once wrote a _MacOS_ shareware review site for a friend, as a single, small perl script that looked through a tree in the filesystem of a BeOS box (on mac-clone hardware), and spit out html. The descriptions and reviews were just metadata columns I added to the relevant mime-types.

I worked in a hospital, and saw similar things, but I think the moral of the story is that huge organizations operate internally more like a feudal oligarchy. They crystallize, regardless of the external market.

It definitely _looks_ spammy. I think what's absent from this discussion, though, is that these are bands with a 'taper' culture, and the app is only useful for these, niche bands.

If an Umphrey's McGee fan (I've seen them ~10 times; a close friend has seen them >170x) were interested in an app to play music on their phone, and could only search using vague terms, like "free music", the results will be mainstream and commercially motivated; not a good match for their actual desire, of listening to that one show they went to, back in '05.

I agree with you in the short term, and disagree in the ideal/long-term.

I think we can replace this pachinko machine of representative democracy, not with some one or two dimensional direct-democracy, but with the kind of thing that cypherpunks have been thinking about for decades.

But in the short-term, the current zeitgeist, which I _rejoice_ in, as an ex-mormon 'queer' person (so queer I can't categorize myself), I am stricken by the thought that Mozilla may be suffocated by people I would like to hold hands with.

Chunkhost has the same specs at the $9 price point as DO, though they claim 2 cpus (obviously could be apples and oranges). It's Xen, like DO and EC2, and they use ECC ram.

They also have this "hardware upgrade" thing that might make it cheaper at the higher price points, depending on how long you use it, and when each provider eventually upgrades its offerings.

I use them for my personal mail+whatever server, and have been quite happy, for about a year.

I don't want to judge you, not knowing how big a yard you have, but as a downtown apartment dweller, dogs barking provide all the annoyance of car alarms, the same inaction, and a smoldering hatred for people who keep dogs in these conditions.

...and not drive there.

Not everyone has time to know exactly what's supported by every combination of hardware and software they use or might use in the future. Personally, I came under the impression that the major filesystems in linux (or ext4 at the very least) "supported" trim years before I actually got an SSD. When I did, it didn't occur to me that I'd need to provide an option to mount for it to actually use said support.

News to me, and I've been using linux since I downloaded SLS floppies from a BBS. As it happens, I'm running Samsung's "flash friendly filesystem" (f2fs) on this machine; I hope I don't need to make sure _it_ is issuing trim instructions.

I've been thinking about building a 3d livecoding environment centered around emacs, so this very cool to see!

PS. To build the current source on linux, you have to fix the comment in the Makefile that starts with '//' and lowercase the 'Primitives' directory.

For those who are shaking their heads at the idea of their collection fitting on dropbox, or listening to single tracks of whatever is on Spotify, I recommend Subsonic. I stream my whole collection from my home connection to my phone.

http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp

Linux users: I had to install gecko-mediaplayer to watch this latest video.

Show HN?: http://www.vendetta-online.com/h/news_27833.html

Wow, the one submission I've made anywhere that hit the front page, and I'm kicking myself for the title. 'Belt' is really their name for the category of machine architecture in the sense of register and stack machines. 'Mill' is the name of their specific architecture/family.

As far as the meat goes, I'm gratified that I'm not the only one to think this is mindbogglingly elegant. I see some misconceptions in this thread, but I'm finding it difficult to explain the divergences without beginning to inexpertly regurgitate large portions of this and the previous talk (on their instruction encoding).

The Gamestick is powered by MHL if you have it, but you have to power it through its micro-usb port if you have normal HDMI (source: have one). I expect it's the same for the Chromecast.

Yeah, I've gotten two today. Can anyone speak to the aim of these?

Indeed, hypothetically, if a tiny game developer had gotten such a letter, they would probably be asking their friendly lawyer to find a moment to advise them, rather than saying anything publicly. I suspect a great many such extortion letters have been sent; let's hope they sent so many that the combined defense will be enough.

I hadn't thought about it in these terms until this post, and then your comment, but I also see three classes that already fit these terms in my mind. Mine are a bit different, though:

Hacker: explorer, exploiter, duct-taper, as you say.

Engineer: has a strong grasp of algorithms and "the metal". Often a good architect, but won't tend to come up with great new designs. May have trouble reading and working with non-engineers' code, or with nebulous 'specs'.

Developer: if the Hacker is motivated by exploring the clever creations of others, the Developer is motivated by a vision of creating new things (cleverly if possible, but the realization of the vision is more important than the cleverness of the solution). Can be a good architect (and UX designer) if they can learn to control their impulses to innovate, rewrite, and adopt bleeding-edge languages and libraries.

In this taxonomy, "trustworthy and can sit down from 9-5 to do boring code work" applies at least as often to Engineers as Developers; my archetype Hacker will start out with schedule/focus difficulties, but improve with age. I think as each of the 'classes' gains experience, especially in the presence of good examples of the other classes, they make progress in the other classes' areas of strength. The Hackers and Developers get better at writing code the Engineers can stand to work with; the Engineers and Developers accumulate arcane knowledge; and the Hackers and Engineers see more of the space of possibility that their tools give them access to.