Viewing profile — acallan

Why wasn't this part of his due diligence before contractually obligating himself to purchase Twitter?

My position is that the moderation and content policies ("community guidelines") that private companies and individuals have is also a form of expression. For example, this explain…

> What about slander and libel laws or laws about claims made in advertisements? Yep — here we're getting into Prior Restraint. It's both against the law to restrain free speech su…

> there could be stronger laws against media which contains objectively provable lies this is a clear violation of the First Amendment, which makes it legal to publish lies.

There is simply no meaningful legal distinction between the two in this context. See https://twitter.com/badsec230takes

Imagine a scenario where Twitter and Facebook lose their ability to unconditionally moderate the content of their platforms. Presumably they would need to check with government cen…

Do you have any examples of Twitter arresting or imprisoning people for speech, or acquiescing to government censorship? Perhaps you are instead to moderating their private platfor…

Pat was a "boy wonder" at Intel and could do no wrong — until Larrabee. I was working at Intel at the time and remember always assuming that Pat would someday be CEO. His departure…

A soft core is a CPU that is programmed into an FPGA instead of a "regular" core that is made of discrete components.

If refurbishers were able to bypass the activation lock, what would the point of an activation lock be in the first place? This is perhaps one of the most important use cases, and …

Calories and can be converted to Joules. The amount of energy to run a computer (a human computer or a physical one) is interesting to me personally, as is comparing the amount of …

Actually, Silverthorne (the first Atom CPU) added MOVBE.

Incidentally, Steelcase CEO Jim Hackett quoted in this article was just named CEO of Ford.

Relevant http://video.newyorker.com/watch/exclusive-clip-of-le-cafe-d...

Indeed. And the big news is that the paper is available today. http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.03547v1

Why was 64-bit Firefox for Windows so late to release?

I recall learning that the important part of the optimization phase for Itanium was based on runtime performance analysis, not just static optimizations.

Honest question: like what technology? Is there an area of technology that is relatively patent-free?

Cycling. I'm in a club and ride with a group of 20+ people, 4-5 times a week. Most weeks I get at least 150 miles in. I like it for a variety of reasons: it's fun to go fast; it's …

What do you mean by the "real QuickSort"? The professor who taught me Haskell at UT used to work on Burroughs LISP machines and wasn't too concerned with caches, memory, or the lik…

Each list comprehension is O(n). O(n)+O(n)=O(n). Each iteration will roughly bisect the list, resulting in roughly log(n) iterations. Thus the one-liner is O(n*log(n)). Haskell say…

In tests and homework, we would implement the one-liner quicksort with paper and pencil, much like a math test. In a pencil implementation of that Haskell, it is n log(n). Each lin…

Like a lot of UT Computer Science, the implementation is a detail left for the reader. The semantics of the language make the one-liner n*log(n)--that's the takeaway.

Indeed, my first CS class in 1999 at UT was in Haskell. Wow! What a change it was from high school AP Computer Science in Texas, which was (in those days) C++. Seeing QuickSort in …

The author is incorrect in the section about memory fences. x86 has strong memory ordering [1], which means that writes always appear in program order with respect to other cores. …