Hacker News Reader

Uncompetativeon Philip Greenspun Reviews “Lean In”

$845,000,000 salary...

Doesn't this strike anyone else as rather a lot?

Uncompetativeon Ok, glass – new Google Glass concepts

Someone is going to be famous as being the first person to die as a result of being distracted by the intrusive UI of their Google Glass. It will make the news. They will be thought of as a pathetic fashion victim. Winner of a Darwin Award.

Uncompetativeon You are not Steve Jobs

I don't get the point. I am not Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was.

I am me.

Also, all the criticism in this thread that he wasn't a great engineer and Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy should have been given more coverage in the press the month he died is naive to say the least. They were both older. He still had much to do and was the boss of the world's biggest corporation. A bunch of Hackers on Hacker News won't reckon much on Steve Job's contribution to their field, but then he never was a hacker! He was a visionary who appreciated minimalistic design even if this meant that Apple products did fewer things. He made tech popular for the general consumer by simplifying it to just the essentials and burying all of the complexities.

Hackers like to have every choice to exploit. That is why they like PCs and increasingly the Linux OSes. Everyone else that actually wants to get on an accomplish some creative work just ponies up the money for an Apple and what extra they pay out on hardware they tend to save on software - MS Office > iWork.

Choosing which minimal set features to include in a product is harder than just lumping everything in, but the interface is far less cluttered and intrusive with less stuff to learn and therefore easier to use - which may not matter to Hackers like you, but is undoubtedly a factor in Apple's continued success.

Uncompetativeon [dead]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5420283

See? I already thought this was suspicious.

and to think I've spent twenty years doing just the R&D for my MMORTSFPSRPG

Uncompetativeon The Myth of Focus

Your brain is fatigued from doing your PhD. It craves variety. Try doing one of your side projects for a month to refresh yourself. It needs to be something different from your PhD, something fun that you can make immediate progress with and which holds some challenge. Don't just bake ornamental bread.

After this 'reset', you will be in a position to alternate your focus between your PhD and this other activity. You may need to take on another later, but try to keep it below four. This is because your brain may not be that accustomed to the switching of focused attention required by multi-tasking. So don't try spinning too many plates or they will all come crashing down.

The key here is to release yourself from thinking about the outcome of your PhD by tricking your mind into treating it like the other tasks you alternately focus upon. You may assume that doing unrelated stuff would cut into the precious time you need to do your main thing, but by reducing your anxiety over not having finished it already and just enjoying the process of doing it you will find that your productivity will increase as you spend less time not actually working on the PhD, but worrying about it and reading endless articles about procrastination and meditation.

Remember, it may seem a cliche but "The Journey is the Reward" - in other words take pleasure in doing not finishing.

Uncompetativeon 9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp

THE GAME (that's what she is calling it) already has a release date of July 2013 despite there being no evidence of her having written a game before...

Without appearing cynical, can I ask why there is a $10000 pledge band?

Uncompetativeon Procrastination is Not Laziness

I also welcome anyone's anonymous cowardly downvotes

;-)

Uncompetativeon Procrastination is Not Laziness

I think that you make a very important point about discontinuity. It made me think about how I could reduce the inertia of refamiliarization when I resume editing some program after some interruption. I find that I can concentrate for about four hours before my ability to maintain a mental model of the salient aspects of whatever subsystem I am modifying break down and I start to make unconscious mistakes that I fail to notice due to the effort required to direct my little remaining drip of concentration on those aspects that were associated with the initial goal. I suppose one could estimate how much time it would take to make a given change and only attempt it if you knew that you had an ample block of time to complete it without pause, but I somehow feel that this is wishful thinking and that you don't necessarily know what you are getting yourself into when you resume editing some part of a complex system.

Those prone to procrastination will find that the advice to "do a little every day" isn't all that helpful if the task requires the previous day's (partially unfinished) changes to be comprehended before you can pick up where you left off, mental model now reconstructed. There is also a temptation to rewrite this unfinised, untested, undebugged code as unentangled, "fresh", code is easier to write than that which is burdened with interdependencies, observed protocols, ceremony and context-dependent assumptions. Without refamiliarization there is a danger of blundering blindly into damaging changes with subtle, far reaching repurcussions, due to your naive comprehension of the system dynamic.

Given that refamiliarization is exhausting, I wondered if there were remedies that could reduce the time and effort it required each day:

    * Allow the visualisation of the project with a number of domain specific Projectional Editors - derived from an Abstract Syntax Tree
    * Use SSA symbolic variables - imperative programs are hard to understand because they support the reassignment of named data cells
    * If you have to have state defer changes to a globally synchronised Superstep - also support the Command/Query Separation Principle
    * Use a live programming debugger to play with the system and refamiliarise yourself with its dynamical behaviour in a safe sandbox
    * It may help to use a language that scores well on the Halstead complexity measure to reduce overall development effort - Python
    * Use a WHY directed outline for code - that explains its goals through a folding text editor that supports literate programming
    * Avoid fragile base classes - there is very little point having encapsulation if you hack the heritage of an object's genealogy
    * Use Go style interfaces

If all that fails:

    * Revert to the previous working version and redo up to the point of interruption or pause - as it's easier to write entangled stuff

I welcome anyone's opinions on these suggestions, or suggestions of their own...

Uncompetativeon Not Lisp again (2009)

LISP is S-expressions.

Mathematica is M-expressions, kinda...

Macros are considered harmful as they can lead to unmaintainable code.

Uncompetativeon This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

More vegetarian recipe ideas, please... those sound great!

Uncompetativeon This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

Please don't use this as an excuse to let the world's population hit eleven digits.

Stop fucking, for fuck's sake!

Uncompetativeon Where and When Did the Symbols "+" and "–" Originate?

      123 ÷ 4/5 + 6 | 7 x 8

    = 123 ÷ 0.8 + 6 | 56

    =    153.75 + 6 | 56

    =        159.75 | 56

    = 2.85267 857142 857142 857142 857142 857142 857142 857142 857142 857142...

i.e. here | acts as a low precedence division operator, ÷ as an ordinary precedence division operator like infix / and the 'closefix' rational notation 3/4 has the highest precedence in my programming language

n.b. in case you were wondering P v Q is used for Boolean Or.

Uncompetativeon Where and When Did the Symbols "+" and "–" Originate?

What then happens when you have to split a long line of math?

What then happens when you need to multiply 2 by 2?

The answer to the first question is that the following line is begun with a multiplication sign.

The answer to the second question is that bold roman type is used for vectors and often for other forms of tensor like a matrix to overload the semantics of dot and cross to not be scalar products were either of their arguments in italic.

Uncompetativeon Where and When Did the Symbols "+" and "–" Originate?

    X = Y x Z

    B = T ^ F v T

    P = Q n R u S

    C = U cross V

    D = U dot V

    Area = Width by Height

i.e. just capitalising names means that you can define macros that operate as infix operators:

    L . R -> L dot R

    L dot R -> Dot[L, R]

Uncompetativeon Programming is terrible—Lessons learned from a life wasted. EMF2012

This is without question the best lecture I have ever seen.

Uncompetativeon Life is wasting my time

It is only healthy to value potential more than actual results if you agree with the Chinese proverb...

'The journey is the reward'

I agree with the sentiment expressed by this and feel that it is silly to defer gratification to the completion of a goal, whether that reward be pride in your accomplishments, money, or fame. Especially as many long term projects may never be completed as your personal circumstances change to prevent it from being realized, or the endeavour taking so long that it is rendered irrelevant by someone else finishing a similar work before you so that the potential audience you were after has been entirely satisfied by their solution.

If you would still work on whatever you do without payment and you are not obsessing daily about fame and riches coming your way through doing it then you are well adjusted. Obviously, a source of income has to be found for your survival and shelter yet a lot of people work in moderately well paid full time jobs in order to fund lifestyles that compensate them for the time that they have sacrificed or their lack of self-worth.

1. Uncontroversially, nice cars, houses and foreign holidays are paid for largely by not just being part time with maybe some rewarding side-project or voluntary work making them feel that they haven't entirely wasted their week.

2. Controversially, having children is very expensive and time consuming and bad for the planet as the ecological impact from not having a child is the countless generations that will not exist, consuming and polluting, for centuries to come. It may be a matter of being forced to choose between your brainchild and the fruits of an intimate relationship. Luckily, there are signs that educated women are less interested in having babies so men shouldn't resent heterosexual partners that are smarter than them as it may be to their advantage to have them be the one with the powerful career whilst they run the household and code from home.

Uncompetativeon Life is wasting my time

Please. Unless you have adopted a goat, don't call it a kid.

I hate the terms 'kid' and 'kids'.

What is wrong with 'child' and 'children'?

Uncompetativeon Life is wasting my time

You have a partner and access to a beach. I have neither and haven't had a job since 1988. Yet the only thing I have found boring about my life of late has been reading this. I am not going to tell you to stop bleating, to accept the uneliminatable imperfections inherent in life so you can better focus on reducing the recurring overall inefficiencies because I feel it would fall on deaf ears. You can't be helped. You can only help yourself out of this mental rut and change your subjective perspective towards your circumstances by developing not a positive mental attitude but a pragmatic one. I can't reach into your cerebellum and rewire it. You can. It will take about six months - assuming you don't kill yourself in the meantime.

Uncompetativeon WebGL Terrain Flyover Demo

Interesting point. I would pick B because a game's virtual camera doesn't necessarily stick around in the head of your player avatar the whole game, but can shift behind, beside, overhead it as well as flying around the scene cinematically.

If someone is going to start to nitpick about the unreality of B versus A, then they ought to also address the lack of a dynamic focus and changine depth of field that our visual system handles so automatically that we are unaware that it is even happening and that CG doesn't do this.

Uncompetativeon Douglas Adams' 61st birthday doodle by Google

Brownian Motion.

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

Uncompetativeon The Explosion of the Ariane 5

Incorrect.

According to Expert C Programming : Deep C Secrets by Peter Van Der Linden page 61:

    'Table 2-2 The Truth About Two Famous Space Software Failures

    WHEN            MISSION     ERROR                        RESULT                               CAUSE

    Summer 1961     Mercury     . used instead of ,          nothing; error found before flight   Flaw in Fortran language

    July 22, 1962   Mariner 1   "R" instead of "R̅"           $12M rocket and probe destroyed      programmer followed error
                    (to Venus)  written in specification                                          in specification'

I have no idea whether the formatting of this table will be preserved, its inclusion is to save you looking for the book, you could either download the following .pdf and search for 'mariner' due to the lack of page numbers

http://www.e-reading-lib.org/bookreader.php/138815/Linden_-_...

or just use what little Google Books provides

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=4vm2xK3yn34C&q=fortra...

As you can see neither mission involved Mars and the faulty . being used instead of a , was found before it caused any harm.

More information follows on the failed Ariane 5 launch - which Bertrand Meyer attributes to "insufficient specification":

http://se.inf.ethz.ch/~meyer/publications/computer/ariane.pd...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5_Flight_501

Uncompetativeon Twenty dollars in an envelope

I sold my paintbox for £12 in 1988. It ran on a BBC Archimedes 310 in the shop window of the computer store where I bought it doing abstract expressionist artwork to show off its various calligraphic and airbrush tools in full colour.

To put this in perspective Photoshop 1.0 was available back then, ran on a more expensive Macintosh and was black & white.

I sold 4 copies and the shop took a cut.

Uncompetativeon Why Five Days in the Office Is Too Many

I find it disgusting that people are forced to commute at great expense to our planet's dwinding natural resources, their finances, time and stress so that they can physically congregate for an 'inspiring water-cooler moment' that may catalytically lurch their company towards an original, otherwise undiscoverable, profitable path or endless corporate meetings to please unnecessarily multi-layered paranoid management when we have telecommuting, telepresence and the good old fashioned telephone in technology-centric industries.

I could understand 'going to work' if 'work' was a Foundry, or a Mine, but if we are sitting in traffic jams and on crowded trains for hours every day, unpaid, just so we can sit in front of a computer and program software when it is clearly more likely that we will be interrupted to 'sign a card for Jane from accounts who is leaving to have her baby' and lose our flow as a result then the corporations of the future will be leaner and more agile by being virtual.

Uncompetativeon What Coke Contains

"The second ingredient, caramel coloring, gives the drink its distinctive dark brown color. There are four types of caramel coloring — Coca Cola uses type E150d, which is made by heating sugars with sulfite and ammonia to create bitter brown liquid. The syrup’s other principal ingredient is phosphoric acid, which adds acidity and is made by diluting burnt phosphorus (made by heating phosphate rock in an arc-furnace) and processing it to remove arsenic."

Hmmm... arsenic

I'd rather there were no lethal poisons at any point in the production process.

I'm never drinking another glass of Coca-Cola. I'm not touching PEPSI either.

Uncompetativeon What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

Careful... don't choke on that bile

Uncompetativeon 3D printing pen lets you draw sculptures in thin air

I'm very impressed by this.

Uncompetativeon Inventing Chromebook

I think it would be better if Chrome OS were more like Lotus Notes, where a group of individuals can remotely collaborate on a document in the cloud or work offline and replicate their changes overnight for later editorial adjustment.

Uncompetativeon The Chrome Javascript editor can do hot swapping

Pressing Control+S is not the immediate-update mechanism Bret Victor uses as a foundation to his sophisticated ideas about Learnable Programming:

http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

I don't understand how someone can link to his 'Inventing on Principle" video in the second paragraph of their web page and fail to comprehend the material it covers in just the first 6 minutes of its running time. Note, that Bret Victor despises the term 'live-coding' as a description of this work.

Uncompetativeon Mathics - A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica

Mathematical notation is ambiguous and therefore unsuited to parsing as a computer syntax. s(x + y) can represent scalar multiplication, or function application. Mathematica only uses s(x + y) for scalar multiplication and s[x + y] for function application to avoid this problem. Sin[alpha], etc. is just a symptom of its consistent naming convention for built-ins. The use of Capitalised names frees you to create your own function names in lowercase without fretting about namespace conflicts.

I've downloaded Mathics onto my Mac, unpacked it, installed it and tested it without issue. The web interface works well too. I'm very impressed with this software and appreciate all their efforts, especially what appear to be well commented sources. To complain that a better notation could have been used is to completely miss the point. This is for people who would like to use Mathematica syntax but can't afford the licence. I've got four books on Mathematica, but can't remotely afford to purchase it.

Uncompetativeon Why there is no Hitchhiker’s Guide to Mathematics for Programmers

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy already parodies Maths:

http://hhgproject.org/entries/bistromathics.html

Clearly, Douglas Adams spent a lot of time in Bistros, as the second review on this site echoes his sentiments about the odd behaviour of waiters and nonabsolute numbers such as time of arrival:

http://www.yelp.co.uk/biz/giannis-italian-bistro-san-ramon