Hacker News Reader

Benjoon Learning C with gdb

GDB's not the only debugger out there. I think the real limitation is lack of debug methodology in general. I've discovered numerous features of proprietary debuggers just by thinking "I wish the tool could do X" only to find out that it already could.

Benjoon HP Memristors Will Reinvent Computer Memory "by 2014"

Me too. Though it's more expensive than flash memory, it can support a much higher number of erase cycles.

Benjoon Research suggests that more money makes people act less human.

If you'd prefer to read something with more rigor: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=Z...

Benjoon Notch's Specification for the In-Game DCPU-16

No, the binaries may be easier to disassemble, but it's still machine code. I don't have to include the assembly source if I don't want to.

Benjoon Magnet-hashes for all torrents on The Pirate Bay: 164 MB

Yes, in much the same way that any given number could be random, pseudorandom or nonrandom given its context, it can also be in violation or accordance with copyright law depending on its legal context.

Benjoon SOPA Opponents May Go Nuclear

Alternatively, they just spend more money to reelect those politicians until their positions switch. It's not like SOPA proponents won over those constituents to win the support of their reps. Or is this supposed to be a principled stand?

Benjoon Louis CK's self distributed special up to 1MM revenue in 12 days

On his 12/13 post, he gave a floor. Presumably it's in the same ballpark as well.

Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you

Benjoon How to Draw a Circle

Visible means "able to be seen." You can see things that emit or reflect light. Abstract concepts don't emit or reflect light.

Real objects can only approximate a circle. The pedantic definition of a circle in this context is being used to make the point that you can't make a perfect circle with pixels.

Benjoon How to Draw a Circle

Then it's the photons that are visible.

A circle is a set of points, and a point is an abstract concept. Having a photon centered on a point does not make the point visible.

Benjoon The State of the Art is Terrible

Software is just massively complex. Some day, someone will come along with the resources to redo large parts of the technology stack "correctly." If they do it right, it may even be an improvement. But make no mistake, the investment required will be massive.

So until we hit a major technical wall, why bother? Why optimize prematurely until we're bumping up against atoms?

Benjoon Minimum Viable Personality

Yes, Joel is very funny, but not in an overbearing, obvious way.

In an old essay on software specs [1] he states: one of the easiest ways to be funny is to be specific when it's not called for

I've noticed that he does this a lot. All the time. Sometimes too much, like in hginit.com, which I did not find that amusing. But most of the time he is spot on.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000033.html

Benjoon Poll: Non-Founders, Why Are You Not Starting a Start-Up?

This may be a subcategory of "financial reasons," but health care is probably a big factor for a lot of people in the US.

Benjoon Stanford's online Machine Learning class now open for enrollment

There's an unanswered question on this in the class's internal forum: http://www.ml-class.org/course/qna/view?id=17

Benjoon 80% of People Quietly Despise Their Lives

Brene Brown is a researcher who believes that true happiness can only be found in establishing meaningful, deep connections that leave you vulnerable. She has a popular ted talk here:

http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html

Benjoon The Need for More Transit APIs

There is a website scraping based API for realtime data in for the Minneapolis/St. Paul area here:

http://metrotransitapi2.appspot.com/

Source is on github

Benjoon The Patent Pledge

I'd love to see an rss feed on the pledge site.

Benjoon Ask HN: Bad co-founder breakup, what to do?

Usually in this sort of situation you would withhold all IP until he's made good on his verbal agreement. Is that possible?

Benjoon An idea (to fix public transport schedules).

The two routes don't come to the same stop. I'm looking for an easy answer to "Should I wait on Hennepin or Nicollet?" without waiting for multiple pages to load on my phone.

I'd definitely pay $1 if I thought the app would address those two problems. Someone has on open source site for just the NexTrip API, but I haven't had success with it yet: http://metrotransitapi.appspot.com/

Benjoon An idea (to fix public transport schedules).

I use it to check bus times on my way to and from work. There are two different buslines I can wait for, and no easy way to check which one will be coming first - I have to load each page and compare. Also, loading the site on my android phone almost always results in an error the first time - forcing me to load the page again. I haven't taken the time to debug this yet, but it's always annoying when I'm trying to check the bus times on the go.

Benjoon An idea (to fix public transport schedules).

The Metro Transit system in Minneapolis/St. Paul realtime info:

http://www.metrotransit.org/nextrip.aspx

The timing isn't perfect, but it gives you good sense of "Is there a bus coming soon." I've been thinking about coding up my own UI as theirs is pretty mediocre of what I want it to do.

Benjoon Design Secrets For Engineers

You could just as easily say it should be "Software Design Secrets for Engineers" right?

Benjoon Why Are Finland's Schools Successful?

It’s almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry or homeless.

I don't see how this author can fail to make any mention of the vastly different demographics in Finland as compared to the US. Certainly the US system has problems, but acting like the solutions are so easy doesn't help anyone.

Finland has one of the most even wealth distributions in the world. The education problem in the US, as far as I can tell, is mostly in the lower class. So the larger the middle class, the smaller the problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_distributi...

Am I missing something?

Benjoon How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

Related: Amy Hoy on "Help Vampires"

http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/

Benjoon Open Office Layout is Bad for Brain

Yes, I like nature sounding noises like beach or wind.

http://simplynoise.com/ has decent brown noise.

Benjoon Open Office Layout is Bad for Brain

I agree. I've had better results listening to white noise.

Benjoon Mark Cuban: What Business is Wall Street in?

This or a hundred other solutions. There's no political will to do it, because designing more efficient systems does not get you reelected.

Benjoon United States loses AAA credit rating from S&P

There are lots of things we could do to end the recovery. They won't happen because they are not in the best short term interest of the politicians making the decisions. Natural selection has weeded out the congressmen that make decisions contrary to their ability to raise campaign money.

That is the root cause of the problem. Until that is solved, there's no point in dreaming up efficient solutions, because they won't happen.

Benjoon Martin Fowler on Software Patents

Discussions like this strike me as pointless. It's pretty easy to imagine a better patent system. We don't have one because incumbents who benefit from the current system have disproportionate influence over the politicians who could reform the system. Until that problem is solved, this and many other broken systems will never be reformed.

Blaming individual programmers for patent applications, which are probably incentivized by their employers, seems harsh. This isn't a problem that's going to be solved by a some optimistic idealists.

Benjoon It’s Google Plus vs. Twitter, Not Facebook

I agree that feature wise, Google Plus has more overlap with Twitter. So why do people keep comparing it to Facebook?

Because it feels like Facebook. The feeds seem like Facebook feeds, the mobile app seems like the Facebook app. Google and Facebook feel like competitors.

If Google Plus had focused on text messages or had no photos or was just more stripped down in general, it would probably feel like Twitter. The way Google Buzz felt like Twitter.

Benjoon U.S. Debt Default Would Be Worse Than Lehman

Agreed. It's not ideology, it's partisanship. It's the illusion that it's okay for the country to suffer now, because it will benefit my party and after the next election my party will make up for it with the great legislation we will be able to pass.

I'm trying to think of the last time this actually happened. Civil War?