DarkShikari

14 ms·

61.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
Correlation might be useful, but how about causation? The most likely "cause" of criminal recidivism is sending millions of people to prison for minor crimes, where they spend months learning from other criminals, and then are released, upo
62.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
There's often a serious communication barrier between Asian open source developers and Western communities; partially a language barrier, but also other issues. The end result is that a lot of projects end up being de-facto forked by Asian
63.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
Development is mostly prototyping -- you may work on a big project but you end up prototyping a solution to each of the small problems that happens (you know exactly how to solve a problem? great it takes little time to actually write the
64.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
At x264 we've been doing code reviews for years -- the effect is so dramatic that I'd never do anything else ever again if I could help it. Every single patch is reviewed by (at a minimum) both main devs, and preferably some other people to
65.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
The headline is linkbait: they said they're not just a PC company, they're primarily an enterprise-oriented company. Of course, this is a given; that's where most of the profit is. Dell still makes money off their personal computers, but
66.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
First of all, you are comparing apple to oranges. Google+ is not a direct competition to Facebook No matter how much they are claimed to solve different problems, they work in the same way and occupy a similar brain space. Facebook is al
67.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
Blu-ray is an interesting case; the 'pirates' seem to have gotten quite lazy because SlySoft has been doing all their work for them.
68.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
I’ve always thought that DRM only remained unbroken so long as no hacker was interested in breaking it This has always been true; why break the weak DRM on a low-quality 'Netflix' stream when you can do an HDTV rip or even a Blu-ray rip?
69.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
"For a $1,000 laptop, Motorola is demanding that Microsoft pay a royalty of $22.50 for its 50 patents on the video standard, called H.264." I find this doubtful; the licensing terms for H.264 put the per-unit hardware costs at around 10-2
70.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
SIMD died out back in the 90s because no one could get that magical parallelizing compiler to work. That "magical parallelizing compiler" does work, and is known as a "human being". This curious type of compiler has been used for over 20
71.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
Is it really a "specialist" exposure, though? I'm pretty sure "programming a robotic car" involves solving all sorts of problems, not merely ones related to the fact that it is a car, and it is robotic. Even in ordinary college CS, you're a
72.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
Honestly, the class, "Programming a Robotic Car" sounded pretty lame. When am I going to program a robotic car? Never. Programming is not brick-laying. "Learning to program" is about learning to think and solve all kinds of problems, not
73.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
Sure. Makes sense. The question really is about whether or not some of these applications can tolerate errors in the order of 1%. I think the idea here is threefold: 1. The vast majority of computations do not need extremely high precisi
74.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
While impressive, I don't think these results are actually that bad for privacy. 80% precision, for example, is useless when you're matching against tens of millions. It's much the same fallacy of the medical test for a disease that occur
75.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
To give it a different spin, an FPU required an external chip 20 or 30 years ago. Today you have processors smaller than a fingernail running a multi-GHz with pipelined FPU's. GPUs have so many FPUs (literally thousands) that their silico
76.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
But historically, SIMD has not been successful Then why does Intel keep adding larger, more expanded SIMD instruction sets with every new CPU? Why did ARM invent NEON and place it on all the high-end ARM chips, taking up more space than t
77.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
Most video encoders don't have NEON assembly code. If you're doing video encoding on any architecture, you need to use one that has SIMD for your architecture, or else it will be horribly slow. x264 is the only free software encoder I kno
78.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
This is exactly how Wikipedia is supposed to work. If you come up with a new theory that disagrees with scholarly/scientific consensus, an encyclopedia is not the place to publish it. You publish it in a journal; if it becomes a cons
79.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
In some sense, it's a case of "spare the rod, spoil the child": if from a very young age, students learn that plagiarizing and cheating are allowed and expected, that's what they'll do in college too. Schools need to be responsible for enfo
80.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
Much detail on this is expounded on (with at least some sources) in the discussions on Wikipedia about the recently terminated India Education Program. Postmortem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/20... Talk page:
81.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
And way to alienate 50% of your potential customers with (completely unnecessary) heavily gendered marketing, despite the fact that romance is not gender-specific.
82.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
India's college education system is broken, and the statistics bear it out. Comparing it to the United States' -- a system that really isn't so good either -- doesn't even begin to describe how serious the problems are in it. Industry grou
83.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
Here's one example that illustrates one of many possible reasons. I know someone who works at a European DVD/Blu-ray mastering house. Recently they released an anime Blu-ray. He told me that the publisher in Japan refused to let them rele
84.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
Dynamic range is not really relevant to compression. Entropy is much more meaningful, and error images typically have a huge amount of entropy.
85.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
A lot of applications used on ARM may still be crippled due to lack of NEON assembly code. Many number-crunching applications, like compression, have lots of MMX/SSE SIMD on x86, but no NEON, and will likely be slow on ARM until they do.
86.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
She probably skipped a grade. I was 17 when I started college and this wasn't unusual; I wasn't even nearly the youngest person in my class. I doubt that age is that big a factor. I don't think a gap of two years makes it any harder to fi
87.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
Developers make the software that goes on their platform. Microsoft didn't gain their huge market share in the 90s through magical spells; they won by being extremely developer-friendly. Without a "developer community", Apple wouldn't
88.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
By that logic, the "N-word" isn't "hatred of blacks", so it's not racist. "Bitch" is a loaded sexist term, much like the "N-word" is a loaded racist term. There's really never a good reason to use it when you can use something else instead
89.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
It's not about new to computers , it's about new to your interface . If you have a new interface, especially one that works differently from the old interface in a notable way, you can't assume that everyone will instantly figure out your
90.
by DarkShikari 15y ago
I think it's not just "strong wording", but the inarticulateness of the first example comment. You can express strong feelings while still being articulate. Example 1: //FIXME: This code is shit, someone make it better. Example 2: //FIXME:

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