optforfon

well... HN does kinda have a start-up/tech focus. It'd make sense to moderate in a way that kept people "on topic". If you want general discussion there are better places for that.

Ah, the LA smog always looked a disgusting yellow to me. But I've only see in the past 10 years

what...? Your example is a convoluted extension of the police-officer example except you added the dog element which I think most people agree is messed up... but that's a separate unrelated issue to address.

I'm saying if you have a private/secret meeting in your basement about how to overthrow the government there is no parallel construction you can make to intercept that. If you have secret files on your computer you can't have cops "accidentally" bump into them.

I'm really doubting "you will never have information that's so secret that you can't build a parallel construction"

Right but the "made up story" has to be legally sound. Like they have to put a police officer at the right place at the right time. How is that a bad thing?

Like you can still have information so private that you can't build a parallel construction - right?

Like it feeeels wrong.. but I can never articulate what the problem is with parallel construction. Can someone give a quick explanation of why?

Just a different perspective: maybe give other doctors more of the benefit of the doubt? I have a family friend who's I guess what you'd call "on the bell curve" and he described to me the process. Basically he says that the representatives are paying for the doctor's time/attention with fancy dinners and whatnot. Doctors are busy people and can't read about every drug and study that's being released. He, just like you, takes in the information skeptically and ask for what studies have been performed etc. etc. Like you say, the representatives aren't scientists so often they won't know the answer and they will take notes and have their company send the doctor a custom made document answering everything he wanted to know (as you know, the marketing budgets are insane).

It's sorta similar to the function congressional lobbying is supposed to fulfill. Ie. It'd be ideal if the congressmen/doctors did all the research themselves but that's not possible so you basically have a whole research team at your disposal (who's agenda is very obvious...)

Well as a freelancer it's something I've sorta given up hope on being able to do. Thanks again for the information. Hopefully it'll give me some ideas.

Thanks for the explanation - that really clarified things for me. The breakdown between story, task, sprint and milestone is very interesting and well thought out. Good estimate generation is the holy grail

This is a simplistic answer. Look at East Asian cultures to seem a much more sexual conservative environment. Try to delve into the why and it's complicated! As far as I can tell it boils down to marriage stability. Most people date to marry (any relationships that don't lead to marriage are viewed as a failure). Promiscuity leads to sexual insecurity as the less experiences partner fears not living up to the more experienced partners expectations. So this creates a strong downward pressure on everyone to not be promiscuous (and in small communities peer pressure is overwhelming)

I can imagine that historically prostitution was kinda the equivalent of becoming a eunuch. Sure it maybe pays well, but you typically won't marry (I guess unless your stunningly beautiful?) and you won't carry on your family lineage (or the vague female equivalent)

I'm not a management guru, so I might be off-base but Agile isn't about sprinting tasks. Tasks, broken up enough, are much smaller than a sprint. It's about having a deliverable at a certain short term goal post. You cut corners and smash half finished features together to reach that goal so that you have a product you can pivot around (the word "pivot" always makes me throw up a little - maybe... reassess the direction of the project?). With test driven development and continual integration tools you constantly have a deliverable, so there is no longer any reason to sprint. You can "pivot" or whatever at any point in time

The real question is test driven development / continual-integration worth doing? CI isn't too controversial, but for TDD there is no clear answer and it really depends on the domain and what language you work in etc. etc.

I didn't have facebook all through college. A few years after I decided to get one and my social life blossomed. Now it's by far the most important piece of technology I use. I keep in touch with people all over the world - some who I met once in some distant country. So easy to hit up someone you haven't talked to in months. It's amazing

So does this mean that the mediocre and expensive private colleges end up paying off a lot more than state schools? (the "I" being higher and therefor the "R" being higher too)

That's deeply unsettling...

- the license plate thing as far as I know is only in Beijing where they're really desperate to do anything

- The cars in general are pretty new (people are heavily in debt to finance their cars and iPhones). In the big cities you never see the typical eastern european thing where someone put their foot down on the gas and a plum of exhaust comes out. Every car seems to run clean. Taxis are old, but they run on natural gas.

- All scooters are electrics. This is actually amazing to see for the first time b/c you never hear about it in the west. But 99% of the scooters are electric and silent. It's amazing. And we're talking about like half the traffic is on scooters. So this is big!. Funny enough I wouldn't even know where to buy one in the west.

- the reality is that the pollution is almost entirely from the factories and powerplants. It really looks different from what you see from cars. It's like a haze.. sorta like fog, but more gray. But it's very uniform and everywhere. Electric power is very very cheap in China. They're scared of the price ever going up b/c it's take a toll on manufacturing.

Well for one Eclipse!!! doesn't scale and is unusable on 4K displays. Tons of other applications don't... things get goofy and it makes the whole system seem kinda amateurish... And I don't really see the difference with text... maybe you have very small fonts?

Except that generally the point of using C is to squeeze performance out of your alogorithms - so you can't limit yourself. But even the simple straightforward stuff has been done just sloppily. I think we just take for granted that it's part of the learning curve and that programming just isn't easy.

And eventually your fingers memorize all the nuanced and sure if you don't screw up it all works. But it's designed in a way where you end up shooting yourself in the foot. It's hard to reason about pointer and reference notations, everyone eventually miss a break in a switch - const is weird, arrays vs. pointers is weird. Symbols are needlessly overloaded to do different hings. Things that seems like they'd work for strange reasons don't EXAMPLE:

foo(const char p) { }

main(int argc, char argv) { foo(argv); }

I really really recommend opening up "Expert C Programming". I promise by page 50 you will be angry - not because there are so many gotchas, but because most of them are completely fixable. Just no one has bothered to do it

The more I learn C the more I hate it. At first it seems simple and easy but reading "Expert C Programming" is reading a laundry list of what's really messed up with the language. 80% of the problems would be solved by some sane syntactic sugar that compiles down to C

I'm surprised that this even happens. It's so involved to make a transaction yourself. It's not like leaving your keys on the kitchen counter. It's more like building a house and forgetting to add a door

I think you're reading something I didn't write. The point isn't to condoning these governments' behavior. I'm just pointing out that the fact that people are systematically altering their online behavior because the government has the ability to look at their activity just reeks of culturally induced inflated sense of self importance.

Hopefully that makes a bit more sense =)

Yeah, just like people before Google Maps thought it was weird to have photos of everything - and now it's totally okay.

From my limited experience it's also true for Singapore and Japan - so I'm inclined to believer there is an East Asian cultural element to it. When I tried to explain to some Japanese colleagues that a lot of Americas believe we should have the right to have firearms so that people have a mechanism to overthrow the government they looked at me like I was insane (b/c why the hell would you want to overthrow the government? Are you a psycho?!)

To me this is so bizarre. Now that I'm living in Asia (mainland China) it's even more bizarre. Because here ofcourse the government has the ability to look at everyone's communication - but no one has the ego to think they personally will be looked at. People appreciate that there are millions of people and no one actually cares about you unless you're really making waves.

Look back at the US, my home country, I feel like a lot of people are on the off-the-grid-survivalist spectrum of paranoia. The FBI NSA CIA don't care about 99.99% of you. They never will. Can you guys stop thinking we're an election or two away from a fascist dystopia?

Anyways.. just a different perspective from the other side of the globe

Well I think the synergy that Windows was developing (Phone, Desktop, XBox, Kinect, etc. unified APIs) had a lot of potential to provide developer lock-in and a very compelling alternative to the hardware lock-in of Apple and the spaghetti of half baked alternatives in the OSS world.

Unfortunately the quality has been a complete disaster. Instead of focusing on what open-source fails to deliver - quality and polish (b/c people who work for free want to work on fancy shiny new things, or do complete rewrites instead of polishing old code bases) they just kept pumping out more half baked features.

Now Nadella has gone for some strange short-term populist plan of giving away all their intellectual property, eliminating lock in, and banking the whole enterprise on the cloud (which has almost no lock in!). I think he's going to Microsoft into an early grave

I think the real threat are the flies. The ones that take a chunk of flesh out of you when they bite and hurt like a bitch

How about dealing with mosquitoes/flies? I've talked to people who know what it's like living on the land in Siberia (ie. like the Yukon - permafrost and swamps) and it's a life threatening issue. You can't have any skin exposed so traditional methods of dealing with it involve things like greasing your face and using natural repelants. Again.. doable but very unpleasant and it makes it very difficult to do things in the summer.

the software has to be compiled with symbols... which I don't think the binaries in the default repositories have (I could be wrong)

I also thought it was a Lutheran thing. Kinda matches the cold depressing churches the Lutherans build

They've also really made emacs a very viable IDE using rtags/irony + cmake. It's a real shame the GNU ecosystem has fallen behind b/c it's really mature, integrated with system tools and also modular (just not as module) - and I'm stuck using it if I want to target embedded =(

I'm confused by the reasoning... why can't you just statically link your distributed exe?

Thanks for the links! This info is kinda hard to find if you're not in the loop.

But it looks like low level optimization is a low priority for the Rust project at the moment.

(prefetch is rejected b/c of insufficient testing and branch hinting might get hampered b/c Rust developers aren't trusted to use them correctly)

Maybe I'll revisit it in the future! Appreciate the help =)

A few days ago I posted a comment with my problems with C. Can you use Rust as a better C/cross-platform-assembly?

does it have native support for

- vectorization/SIMD

- hinting at likely branches

- prefetching memory

- forcing or blocking inlining

and all the magic in gcc C extensions

Which makes living on the Moon suddenly not look so bad!