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throwaway-1209

286 karma · joined May 22, 2017

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throwaway-1209··on Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?
No, a statement is not evidence no matter how much you want it to be. A _sworn testimony_ of a _witness_ is evidence. But there can't really be any witness here, unless the person on the other end was extremely careless. So you get a bunch of hot air and unsubstantiated allegations which will never go anywhere.
throwaway-1209··on Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?
That would be unbelievably stupid. It's not like in DOJ anyone cares if she "did the right thing", they'll put her in the slammer all the same. Not even Hillary Clinton would get off scot free after something like this.
throwaway-1209··on Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?
That's a statement. Statements are not evidence. I can make it seem like it's GRU (or "the Chinese") from right where I am in the US, with no way for anyone to say it ain't so. And I'm not even a pro.
throwaway-1209··on Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?
Nah. Only 6 people have printed the doc and of those only one could be found in phone call metadata making a call to a press related contact. I don't know what the leaker was thinking.

And in the end even this leak doesn't contain any evidence of anything that would even tie it to Russia, let alone GRU. On the internet no one knows you're a dog. So she will get 10 years in the slammer for nothing.

throwaway-1209··on Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing
Amazing to see the number of people who try hard to justify this blatant rip off pricing. This is coming from the same group of people who complain endlessly about the cost of wireless data and telco data caps.
throwaway-1209··on Apple Announces macOS High Sierra
Lots for ML, and their Accelerate framework is already second to none on the CPU. Meanwhile, Microsoft doesn't even bundle BLAS with their OS.
throwaway-1209··on Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is developing border surveillance technology
That's a dangerous slippery slope you're descending. You may at some point end up on the receiving end.
throwaway-1209··on The Microarchitecture of Intel, AMD and VIA CPUs [pdf]
Does anyone know of a similar document for ARM, and in particular for the various flavors of aarch64?
throwaway-1209··on PG-Strom: SSD-To-GPU Direct SQL Execution
I guess if your where clause is very selective, you could avoid the hit since the same branch is taken by all threads in a warp. But then there are better approaches such as BRIN indexes, RLE and dictionary encoding with which you don't even touch the data that doesn't match your clause.
throwaway-1209··on Ask HN: Why shouldn't I leave Google?
You're a better manager than any of the ones I had at Google. That said, your boss might laugh _you_ out of the room, bringing us back to square one. He/she doesn't cherish the idea of hiring a replacement for the duration, or scaling back what he/she promised to _his/her_ boss (whew, those gender pronouns make it a mouthful). It's one thing if you need to care for a sick relative or something, any tech company will make accommodations. But to "travel" so you could gestate your startup idea -- that's pretty much a GTFO right off the bat.
throwaway-1209··on Rewrite Linux Kernel in Rust?
Opcodes are fine, no one is saying everything has to be expressed as an operator. I'd like to see more of a C/C++ intrinsics syntax, but with total control over the order of instructions and register allocation. Basically same power as assembly, syntax close to intrinsics, but you tell it which registers to use, and there's one instruction per line, and they're executed exactly as you write them, with no creativity on the part of the compiler.
throwaway-1209··on Ask HN: Why shouldn't I leave Google?
No one in our industry will "starve on the streets" in the foreseeable future. They may have to take a smaller paycheck with a contract that doesn't have the clauses they don't like, but let's not engage in histrionics here. And I agree with the parent, your choice of language is inappropriate and tiresome. You're posting to a forum read by literally thousands of people you're calling "bootlickers". Not smart.
throwaway-1209··on Ask HN: Why shouldn't I leave Google?
And that's exactly what those contracts are aiming for: not to control your mind, but to establish a deterrent from much more nefarious shenanigans, if thoughts of such shenanigans arise. Some of the top Silicon Valley companies (dating all the way back to the 70's) would simply not exist if those contracts were followed to the letter.
throwaway-1209··on Ask HN: Why shouldn't I leave Google?
It's fuck or get fucked. I'd rather not get fucked, same as you. It's just that now I'm on the other end.
throwaway-1209··on Ask HN: Why shouldn't I leave Google?
Words of a man with not much to lose. Once your net worth is in multiple millions, the calculation will change quite a bit. You will most definitely not want to lose your life's savings on a moral crusade.
throwaway-1209··on Tesla owners should pay more for insurance, AAA says
There are only a handful of shops around where I live that will even touch a Tesla when it comes to body work. Aluminum is hard to work with. OTOH someone who has paid $100k for a car should be able to fork over $300 more a year.
throwaway-1209··on PG-Strom: SSD-To-GPU Direct SQL Execution
Where clause is the worst possible use case for GPU: GPUs don't tolerate branches or non-coalesced memory access all that well, and WHERE executes a ton of branches. Even so, things seem to be faster. Go figure.
throwaway-1209··on Ask HN: Why shouldn't I leave Google?
If you don't like compensation the door is open, you can leave. Look, I agree with you in principle, but I'm now a large shareholder in a business, so I see the other side of the argument too. The goal isn't really to stop anyone from pursuing something unrelated, an idea that's mostly theirs. The goal is to avoid Levandovsky-style backstabbing. Especially for small companies, this can be fatal.
throwaway-1209··on Ask HN: Why shouldn't I leave Google?
6 months "to travel"? Your manager will laugh you out of the conference room. A month, that should be doable.
throwaway-1209··on Ask HN: Why shouldn't I leave Google?
It's been a few years since I left, I don't remember. I do remember there are level and performance requirements, too, and there's no guarantee that they hold your old spot for you when you come back. So you do very much depend on the benevolence of your corporate masters.
throwaway-1209··on Ask HN: Why shouldn't I leave Google?
I agree with you in principle, but I've seen shit you wouldn't believe when there's a few million dollars at stake: otherwise fine, ethical, upstanding human beings can turn into the worst weasels you can imagine if you don't hold the sword of legal retribution over their heads to assure their good faith. You won't quite understand that until you actually work on something you have a vested interest in succeeding, as in, a substantial financial stake, not some bullshit koolaid they feed you as you're slaving away on an irrelevant product #24554 at a Megacorp Inc.
throwaway-1209··on Ask HN: Why shouldn't I leave Google?
Yes you could, but there's no guarantee whatsoever they actually will let you come back. It's a subtle point which many people don't understand. The first part, them deciding to let you come back, is not deterministic. The second (no interview if you didn't suck before you left) is. I know several xooglers who went back (in one case 3 years after leaving, no interviews). I also know several who got their applications chucked into /dev/null, in spite of being kickass engineers and good people in all other regards.
throwaway-1209··on Ask HN: Why shouldn't I leave Google?
Junior SWEs don't get a sabbatical, unpaid or otherwise.
throwaway-1209··on Ask HN: Why shouldn't I leave Google?
There's no grace period as far as I know. That'd be stupid on their part: every keyboard jockey would immediately threaten to leave in hopes of getting a counter. Why not, if there's a "grace period"?Once you leave, there's no guarantee whatsoever that they'll want you back, even if you were doing well before you left. And that's by design.
throwaway-1209··on Ask HN: Why shouldn't I leave Google?
From someone who's been there done that: former Googler, now running engineering at a startup. It doesn't get any easier to come up with a startup idea once you leave mothership. I know it seems counterintuitive, since once you leave you have nothing else to do but come up with ideas, but you could find that after 6-9 months you still don't have anything you really believe in. That's what happened to me circa 2008. In the end I just joined Google back then. So your mentor seems to be right, even though what he's suggesting is not 100% ethical: if you read your contract you'll see that all of your software related ideas are property of Google. But they can't read your mind (yet) so there's no way for them to enforce this, unless you tell them about it or do something stupid, like using company laptop (or Borg, or Google3 code) to work on it.
throwaway-1209··on Rewrite Linux Kernel in Rust?
+1. Make it look more like a severely restricted version of C.
throwaway-1209··on Rewrite Linux Kernel in Rust?
"And don't call it Linux because I own the trademark".
throwaway-1209··on Rewrite Linux Kernel in Rust?
Makes you wonder why not write it as e.g. "eax mov 5" or even "eax = 5".
throwaway-1209··on Rewrite Linux Kernel in Rust?
Let's see what Linus thinks about this.
throwaway-1209··on Sublime Text build 3133 now available
Can it print yet? I was surprised to discover there was no built in way to print out the text I was editing (on Linux). I do sometimes print out especially gnarly code to think about it on paper.
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