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bjwbell

I do not want to give up any privacy. The stasi wasn't that long ago.
Re:Ask HN: Is Python dying? on Monday February 15, 2016 @12:12AM (#11101634)
It's dead because new projects aren't started in Perl unlike C.
Re:How Silicon Valley is dealing with mental illness on Thursday February 11, 2016 @03:00AM (#11078859)
ECT gets a bad rap, but works. Anecdotally, my uncle went through it.
Re:How Silicon Valley is dealing with mental illness on Thursday February 11, 2016 @02:49AM (#11078806)
What actually made a difference, for me, was changing my work. My dad experienced this too. If you're depressed maybe you need to change your life, this is hard. It was for me.
Re:Ask HN: What's going on at IBM? on Monday February 08, 2016 @05:51AM (#11057413)
It jelled with what I know anecdotally. Their Indian outsourcing is terrible, bad compensation, nothing close to Google or other tech companies in India. This is from a few years back.
Re:Ask HN: Which industry sector should I target? on Wednesday February 03, 2016 @06:54AM (#11025965)
Learn the art of writing gpu compilers. Software defined radio is another.

If you find web-scraping dull don't pursue it. Life is short.

Re:Twitter’s Silence on State-Sponsored Attacks on Thursday January 21, 2016 @06:02AM (#10944494)
I follow the national weather service for my area (US). It's awesome they're total geeks about weather and share it.

Everything else is mostly meh.

Re:X.Org Might Lose Its Domain Name on Saturday January 09, 2016 @04:09AM (#10870601)
What's bad about his benchmarks? I've cursory glanced at them before and didn't notice anything in particular (used to write gpu drivers for a living).
Re:Inside Graduate Admissions on Thursday January 07, 2016 @02:55AM (#10856610)
Considering the completion rate for PhD programs, admitting a broader applicant pool would likely make it worse.
AT&T, rolled out fiber to many of the suburbs. I can't imagine switching back to Comcast, night and day.
Re:Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video] on Thursday December 03, 2015 @01:27PM (#10671513)
You're right, the comparison isn't as valid as I thought, rustfmt has improved impressively since I looked at it last. 'go fix' might be a better comparison, what's the Rust equivalent?
Re:Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video] on Thursday December 03, 2015 @12:53PM (#10671171)
I should have been more specific by tooling. I meant source code manipulation and analysis, go-oracle and goimports are a couple. There's many more in the go community.

Are they useful, I'm not sure. They feel useful but I have little trust in my judgment. When I switched back in the day from VS to emacs I didn't seem to miss all of the refactoring tools VS provided.

Re:Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video] on Thursday December 03, 2015 @11:53AM (#10670630)
I'm thinking more of difficulty in writing rustfmt compared to gofmt. There's other examples like go-oracle or goimports which as far as I know don't have Rust equivalents.

How useful the extra tooling is, I don't really know.

Re:Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video] on Thursday December 03, 2015 @11:20AM (#10670413)
Perhaps I should have said it's easier to write tooling. C++ has arguably very good tooling but creating it was difficult.

For Rust and Go the example I'm thinking of is rustfmt and gofmt.

Re:Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video] on Thursday December 03, 2015 @08:20AM (#10669386)
I'm familiar with Rust's tooling, not knocking it at all.
Re:Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video] on Thursday December 03, 2015 @04:33AM (#10668698)
There isn't one language to rule them all. An advantage of Go over Rust is easier tooling due to a simpler language, an advantage of Rust is a richer type system. These are in opposition.
Re:Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video] on Thursday December 03, 2015 @03:15AM (#10668474)
Nice phrasing, unpleasant was the feeling I was going for.

Sometimes I wonder about giving up.

Re:Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video] on Thursday December 03, 2015 @02:18AM (#10668268)
Some history might help. Go was created largely as a reaction to writing server side C++. I have sympathy after writing but mostly reading C++ code bases. I swore never again.

I react in horror to the features being added to CUDA and SyCL to make them closer to C++.

I still hate C++ with a passion, grepping around in gecko is much harder than servo.

Re:Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video] on Thursday December 03, 2015 @01:59AM (#10668192)
That's why I said large set. I haven't thought about garbage collection enough to have any insight on it.
Re:Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video] on Thursday December 03, 2015 @01:07AM (#10668040)
How do you have a large set of language features with them not interacting?

In Java, serialization and generics interact with practically everything.

In C++, RAII interacts with exceptions, which is the point but isn't exactly pleasant.

Re:What Is Spacetime, Really? on Thursday December 03, 2015 @12:39AM (#10667963)
I don't find it unsettling but it's not particularly interesting. You can view epicycles as detour before Copernicus, I think that's more of the sense of what Wolfram is referring to as a detour.
Re:Sitting on an Ocean of Talent on Thursday December 03, 2015 @12:24AM (#10667921)
For one, if you take global warming seriously it's a disaster. Each immigrant from a poor to rich country increases their CO2 emissions by about an order of magnitude.
Re:Rob Pike: Simplicity Is Complicated [video] on Thursday December 03, 2015 @12:20AM (#10667908)
Wrong C++. maybe that's why he didn't say, it's all of them (for an approximate value of all).
Re:A letter to our daughter on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @09:22PM (#10660467)
Overwhelming evidence is needed that Gate's philanthropy will be remembered more than his computing career. Carnegie is remembered for steel before philanthropy.

Carnegie's wiki page "Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish-American industrialist who led the enormous expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century. He built a leadership role as a philanthropist for the United States and the British Empire."

Re:What photos of Facebook’s new headquarters say about work on Tuesday December 01, 2015 @04:31AM (#10654344)
Rich Geldreich http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/01/open-office-spaces-and-c...

"1. North Korea-like atmosphere of self-censorship: ... even simple conversations with other coworkers can be difficult, because all conversations are broadcasted into the room and you've got to be careful not to step on the toes of 10-20 other people at all times. Good luck with that."

It was hard for me to find projects I found interesting enough to contribute to.

It wasn't until I had an overarching purpose that I found success. It took about 5 years.

Re:Hacking GCN via OpenGL on Saturday November 28, 2015 @02:19AM (#10640341)
That's what I know too for graphics draw calls. For GPGPU there's been hard work for finer grained preemption, last I looked into it (~1yr ago) on Linux it was a work in progress to put it kindly.

If you're curious, lookup the Intel Broadwell GPU specs, there's sections devoted to the various levels of preemption. If you're really curious look up the workarounds needed for the finest grained preemption (this would be preempting a single GPGPU draw call).

Then decide enabling fine grained preemption should probably wait for Skylake, unless you took too much Adderall and no challenge sounds impossible. Do I speak from personal experience? I plead the fifth.

I've no experience with how fine grained nvidia's preemption is.

With the cost in multiple billions to build a fab and the consolidation of semiconductor manufactures the reduction in # of architectures isn't surprising.
Re:Firefox: We Don't Need Google's Money Any More on Thursday November 26, 2015 @02:21AM (#10631733)
Performance, I don't mean benchmark performance but the sucky stuff.

Today on Linux I have to restart Firefox every ~20min because it slows to crawl. I don't know why and don't really care, because it'll take an unknown amount of time to root cause and 6 months from now an OS or browser update is likely to cause something similar.

I'm not dissing the Firefox devs. Google seems to have more people to throw at this problem.

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