Hacker News Reader

J_McQuadeon Energy saving light bulbs offer dim future

Dear Daily Telegraph,

When an energy saving light-bulb is on, can you see?

Good, now be quiet.

J_McQuadeon Gordon Brown apologises to Alan Turing

Actually, the Secretary of State for Justice has the power to grant a royal pardon, and notably exercised it just the other day:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_of_Michael_Shields#R...

J_McQuadeon Are Algorithms the Magic Bullet?

Good comment.

Saying that algorithms are the secret to the success of Google and the like is like saying that tunnelling machines are what made the London Underground popular - not quite true. Obviously, once they'd had the idea for the Underground, designing and building the machines for its construction became an absolute necessity which allowed them to create a far more wide-reaching network than previously thought possible - but this ignores the fact that people would still have used it if it had remained a hand-dug tunnel between King's Cross and Paddington.

In short, one could say that insight makes things popular while implementation makes them excellent - and that you should really be aiming for both.

J_McQuadeon The Most Important Agile Practice Of All

Oh, certainly - I was just (flippantly, I admit) pointing out that I'm fairly sick of hearing about programming methodology X or Y. I have nothing against the practices themselves, mind - just chalk it up as a friendly bout of HHOS.

J_McQuadeon The Most Important Agile Practice Of All

The Most Important Agile Practice Of All?

"Remember to shut up about Agile for a minute and write some damned code!"

J_McQuadeon A possible approach to learning Common Lisp

Inevitable?

J_McQuadeon A possible approach to learning Common Lisp

Seems dead to me - HN'd into in inoperability, perhaps?

[edit] Just noticed it's been posted to reddit, too. Surely it didn't stand a chance!

J_McQuadeon Ask HN: Haiku?

  A confusing thing:
  
  Many seem to say "Oh Ess"
  
  Whereas I say "Oss"

J_McQuadeon [dead]

I REFUSE TO DO BUSINESS WITH ANYONE WHO DOESN'T BELIEVE EXACTLY THE SAME THINGS I DO REGARDING ANY ARBITRARY SUBJECT!

Seriously, though, this sort of senseless group-think annoys me. It also seems to stem from some sort of misguided belief that this is an 'ethical' company and that 'ethical' is a binary toggle that has to encompass everything an entity does or says in every regard - Suffice it to say that an increasingly significant part of me just wants to crawl into a hole and wait for the world to grow up.

J_McQuadeon Music Labels to launch CMX, a new digital album format.

But surely that's assuming it'll only work on Windows...

... oh, wait. Carry on.

J_McQuadeon Petition to the UK government to apologize to Alan Turing

As a typical cynical Brit, I think it'd be a good exercise to one day make a list of all the people to whom the UK technically owes an apology, but not to actually say sorry until we get an apology from everyone that we feel owes us one. And yes, that includes you, Italy - don't think we've forgotten that little hoo-ha between Boudicca and Paulinus! It may have been the first century AD, but some scars just never really heal.

Oh, and if I come across as crass, it's because the whole notion of the thing is absurd. History is history - we all routinely did some horrifically awful things, but we don't do them now and no-one's seriously suggesting that we should.

J_McQuadeon Ask HN: What do you drink?

Buying a tea infuser is one of the best things I've ever done - real leaf tea by the cup! Moroccan mint is my favourite at the moment, but I like to experiment, and can't help but think that in tea I've just found one more thing to be geeky about.

I also find that the regular ritual of making tea helps to stop my thought processes from falling down rabbit holes, so to speak. It's sometimes good to step back and wait for kettles to boil and leaves to steep.

J_McQuadeon [dead]

This could probably be generalised to "techthingvstechthing.com".

J_McQuadeon Did you mean recursion?

No, but the back button still works :]

J_McQuadeon Did you mean recursion?

How long before someone moans about it not performing tail call optimisation, do you reckon?

J_McQuadeon Some Emacs Key Combinations - Easy Reference

Nice reference to have around but, when I started using emacs, going through the help and writing up my own cheat sheet from it was one of the most useful things that I did!

J_McQuadeon Ask HN: How do you see the future of computing ?

Whatever we're using, there'll be plenty of tongue-in-cheek posts recalling the glory days of 'real programmers' implementing custom Hashtables in pure Java, no less, in order to avoid the synchronisation issues in their company's Enterprise Framework, or whatever.

And they say the magic's gone out of programming!

J_McQuadeon TechCrunch: Skating on Thin Ice

The tone reminds me exactly of the bit in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where Slartibartfast calls Arthur Dent "late" in an effete attempt to sound sinister and threatening...

... but that's probably just me, though.

J_McQuadeon Bill Gates offers the world a physics lesson

Marred only by the fact that half the people I know can't even get it to work.

J_McQuadeon Yes, I Suck: Self-Help Through Negative Thinking

I don't know - I find that telling yourself you're great just leads to ambiguity; I mean, what exactly are you great at?

As an observation (and whether or not it's right), we tend to view the world in terms of people who 'are' great or people who 'suck at' things, if you see what I mean. As such, "I'm so great - why can't I write this parser" becomes a much less helpful notion than "I suck at writing parsers" because the former implies failure whereas the latter implies a much greater scope for improvement.

I admit that it's all a bit hand-wavey, but by and large I find that my positive thoughts tend to be general ("Ain't life grand?", "Man, this world is awesome") whereas the negatives often settle on specifics ("My handwriting is embarrassing!", "I don't comment my code nearly enough") - I think we can all agree that knowing specifically where things are going wrong is far more useful than knowing were they're going right in general.

J_McQuadeon Tom Williams: Hired by Apple at 14. His full story.

"Elbow-Grease and Gumption: The Secret That Self-Help Books Don't Want You To Know"

J_McQuadeon Teaching code optimization to 11-year-old son.

When I was 11 years old, my dad taught me to be a goalkeeper. I've now not touched a football since I was 15.

J_McQuadeon [dead]

To be honest, I thought it was a joke to start with - look at what he compares it to!

For 10bucks, I can get four iced espressos at Starbucks, eight bags of Swedish Fish, 9 soft serves from McDonald’s, or nine 99cent iPhone apps, etc., etc.

Ignoring the crappy maths towards the end there, I can't think of one time where I've been faced with a piece of software that could potentially enrich or ease my life on a day to day basis and thought "Hmm... maybe I'll just pig out on ice cream instead."

I had no idea that the software engineer had become so devalued. Seeing how greatly that point overshadows the rest of the (probably quite useful) piece, I can't help but think techies aren't really the intended audience.

J_McQuadeon How An Indie Musician Made $19,000 In 10 Hours Using Twitter

Well, a close friend of mine helms a moderately well-known metal band (albums charted in Germany, high on the UK Rock Charts and on the Billboard Heatseeker charts in the US) and after two successful albums, a few large European tours and a month touring the US (in itself a big feat for a European metal band), they are still 'down' by a figure in the order of tens of thousands of GBP to their record label. It's definitely a tough game.

J_McQuadeon How An Indie Musician Made $19,000 In 10 Hours Using Twitter

The title makes it sound like it was a 'nobody' suddenly using the 'net to strike gold - Amanda Palmer has a veritable army of uncommonly loyal fans, fans who would certainly pay far more than $25 for impromptu hand-designed T-Shirts from her, whatever the medium through which they were advertised. This story is, for anyone without such a fanbase, worthless.

And 'indie musician'? The text itself (that was copied wholesale from the artist with little/no value added) references a "huge-ass ben-folds produced-major-label solo album"! Stupid stupid linkbait. That said, it is a fantastic record and it's a shame to see she's not made any money from it as yet.

J_McQuadeon Pocket Programming: Learning New Skills Anywhere

A few scraps of paper and a pencil! There are countless books of logic puzzles around, or you could just brush up on your maths and prove a simple lemma or two, if that's your cup of tea.

J_McQuadeon The Anti-If Campaign

This sort of debate annoys me - not so much because of the potentially fragile design on one side or the perhaps pedantic adherence to OOP principles on the other, but because I know that I could have things like pattern matching and a scarily expressive type system and, well, that'd make a lot of these problems disappear.

Curse you, Haskell, for making me so bitter!

J_McQuadeon Is a Proof a Proof If No One Can Check It?

Well, the proof is perfectly valid, as on some abstract level a computer == Turing machine == something you can reason about. If you can prove that your program works in the required way, then your proof holds.

However, brute force solutions are ugly and shed little (if any) new light on the problem, and in the words of G.H.Hardy - "There is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics". With things like this I just can't help but think that an elegant and enlightening proof will unexpectedly pop up some time in the distant future when we're all off researching some sort of new-age hypermaths or something...

... well, I suppose a man's got to dream, right?

J_McQuadeon The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing

You think that's overdue - the Greek government still hasn't apologised to Socrates!