Hacker News Reader

blackholeon Excess Automobile Deaths as a Result of 9/11

You can't control other drunk drivers, either.

blackholeon US stops jailed activist Barrett Brown from discussing hacking prosecution

I think a lot of people would love to cancel their citizenship with the USA, save for the small problem of not having citizenship anywhere else.

blackholeon [dead]

The universe Apple occupies, of course.

blackholeon Defeated

Why yes, I'd love to drive over the Atlantic ocean.

blackholeon IronPigeon - Decentralized communication protocol for sending secure messages

This is a fantastic idea that would be really cool if it worked... but is there a cryptographer in the room that can verify that it actually does work? There's a dime-a-dozen "secure" communication methods that aren't really secure.

blackholeon “People simply empty out”

I feel like too many people get sucked into the idea of furthering their career, to the point that they forget to further their own life.

What is the point of existence if we never get around to experiencing it?

"It's not the things we do in life that we regret on our death bed, it is the things we do not." - Randy Pausch

blackholeon JavaScript right on the hardware

I may know javascript, but my god I wish I didn't have to.

blackholeon SculptGL - A WebGL sculpting app

No, I found it on twitter, but it wasn't tweeted by the author either. In fact that website appears to be the only place on the internet the author exists, except for his github profile: https://github.com/stephomi

blackholeon What I Learned In College

What are you talking about? There are lots of problems I'd like to work on. I even asked a professor about them. The problem is that none of the problems I wanted to work on were problems the graduate students were working on, so there was zero support for them. They weren't interested in the kinds of problems I was interested in, which had to do with rasterization and raytracing graphical techniques.

Grad school probably would have run me into the ground. It would have done so for all the wrong reasons. Again, I'm not interested in a hyper-competitive environment where I am judged on all the wrong things. I'd rather do my own research, and have actually made progress along several avenues I'm quite proud of, but currently haven't crystallized into something I can write a paper about (also due to time constraints).

Stop glorifying long work hours. They aren't productive.

blackholeon What I Learned In College

The CSE program does not use its funding very well. This is not something I claim, it's something a CSE professor told me when I pointed out various shortcomings, and he agreed with many of them but was not in a position to do anything about it. That said, the CSE program doesn't have enough funding in the first place, either. That's the primary issue.

blackholeon What I Learned In College

That is exactly the point that I raised in the essay. Education is a really hard problem. I don't claim I know how to fix it, but while everyone seems to agree that everything is broken, we are heading in the wrong direction.

blackholeon What I Learned In College

Several people seem to get this theme out of the essay, which I think is partially due to the sarcastic tone I take in certain sections. I try to make it blatantly obvious that I disapprove of the system in general and think it's a disaster to everyone, not just me.

To be perfectly honest, the system was fairly kind to me. I was able to deal with it. My little brother couldn't handle it and had to go to a special online high school and get tutoring help just to graduate. He is very bright, but the system just crushes him because he can't operate within it very well and the system doesn't care.

I did once try to get into research. Academic research has a whole boatload of its own problems, including the professor/graduate student ponzi scheme and the overemphasis on getting published. I decided doing research on my own would be much more fruitful.

My classmates were usually quite smart. They were also usually just as frustrated with the system as I was.

blackholeon Flaky: datatypes for real world quantities

If you have an equation in your program that can be effectively simplified, you should have simplified it before writing in the first place. The thing about equations that can be simplified is that 99.9% of the time, they can be simplified at compile time.

If you want to write a library to do it for you, great! But don't advertise it as a replacement for floating point number representations, because it isn't.

blackholeon Flaky: datatypes for real world quantities

Hey, if he wants to make a symbolic algebra system, that's great! But don't go advertising it as a replacement for floating point, because it isn't.

blackholeon Flaky: datatypes for real world quantities

Wrong, that isn't what this is. This isn't a nested radical to infinite terms, it's a nested radical to n terms. Thus, it cannot be simplified.

blackholeon Flaky: datatypes for real world quantities

This is a terrible idea. This is a catastrophically bad idea. How do you compare numbers? How do you figure out that 2.2 is less than exp(65)? You have to represent these as numbers at some point in the calculation, and in order to do that, you're probably going to be using either floating point or fixed point, which means it's still trivially possible to construct an error case that suffers the exact same problems normal floating point numbers have. Observe:

    x=1
    for(i=0;i<n;++i)
      x=0.01+sqrt(x)

You can't simplify this, so it will simply loop until it hits the datatype boundary, and then get rounded into oblivion, because the underlying floating point representation will break in the exact same way. The only way to get rid of this would be to use an arbitrary number of bits for precision, in which case... just use an arbitrary precision library instead! This is EXACTLY WHY WE HAVE THEM.

Most equations that aren't trivial cannot be simplified. This datatype would only be useful for spoon-fed high school math problems. Furthermore, it costs so much CPU to perform you might as well just use an arbitrary precision library, which will probably be faster and be just as effective at preventing edge cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrary-precision_arithmetic

blackholeon Why the use of GPL is declining

You know, if I make something open-source, it's because I want people to use it. I refuse to use copyleft licenses because all they manage to do in practice is ensure no commercial venture will ever use your code. If I didn't want a commercial entity using my code, I wouldn't make it open-source.

The GPL was created to help free software, which is more about freedom of speech, not open-source. It should be used only when your code is intended as a contribution to the free software movement, not when it is intended to simply be open-source.

blackholeon Clang: C++11 support is now feature-complete

Meanwhile, I still don't have variadic templates in VC++ 2012.

blackholeon Why Entrepreneurs Hate Working at Big Companies

This article has the right idea, but is obsessed with money. Money is not the fundamental motivator for all entrepreneurs. There are plenty of people who would rather work for themselves and barely be able to pay rent for the rest of their lives rather than work for a large company simply because they will be more happy doing what they love and barely managing to feed themselves than they will doing something they hate and having all the money they ever wanted. They don't care about the money, they care about doing what they love to do. So long as they can feed themselves and find a roof to sleep under, being able to work on something they love to do will trump everything else.

blackholeon Meet the nice-guy lawyers who want $1,000 per worker for using scanners

"I'd appreciate you not running a photo of me, anywhere," said Rust. "You know how photographs work, with copyright and all. If there's a photograph up online of me, I own it."

I guess lawyers don't read the terms and conditions when they use websites, either.

blackholeon 2000, the Year Formerly Known as the Future

I was 9 and ecstatic about getting to stay up until midnight to see the NEW MILLENNIUM. It was disappointing the next day when nothing seemed to change.

Boy did things change during high school.

blackholeon Leading Neuroscientist Says Kurzweil Singularity Prediction A “Bunch Of Hot Air”

The part of the article that bothers me here the most is a leading nueroscientist asserting that the brain is not computable. That is demonstrably false: The brain is a quantum system, just like everything else in the universe. All quantum systems containing n qubits can be simulated by 2^n classical bits. It may very well be impractical to compute a decent sized brain, but that's still technically computable, which is a serious problem in his whole "you can't reduce human nature to a computer algorithm" tirade. Yes, you can. It will be impossibly huge and slow, but you can.

blackholeon [Show HN] An experiment - Group Chat from just a URL

I would love to use this service, but I demand the freedom to bitch and moan to my friends using whatever cuss words I fucking feel like.

blackholeon The Rise Of The Artist

If some dude with bunny ears stops by, that was me.

blackholeon The Rise Of The Artist

I agree - I am more concerned about telling kids to draw instead of learning to code, when it would be much more beneficial to do both. This is a glaring flaw in an otherwise prescient essay.

blackholeon The Rise Of The Artist

While I entirely agree that creativity is the future, I do not understand why people think you need to draw or compose music to be creative. My most brilliant creative moments have always been with my code, not my music. I may consider myself more of an artist than an engineer, but my code is my most precious work of art.

That said, by pure chance I happen to be re-re-re-re-attempting to learn how to draw this year.

blackholeon Why Hating Your Shitty Job Only Makes It Worse

There should be a disclaimer here that, if you are involved with a shitty job that involves customer service, hating it and not doing a good job will almost certainly make it worse, because most people actually like being helpful. Helping someone out and noticeably making their day better is one of the most surefire ways to make yourself feel better, even if you currently have a job you absolutely detest.

Unfortunately, there are also a lot of jobs that really suck where you have absolutely no interaction with any customers or anyone whom you are indirectly helping. In this case, how much better you feel after doing your job properly depends largely on how shitty the job is. If your manager takes all the credit for everything you do, because, well, it's a shitty job, then doing your job well really won't make anything better at all.

Of course, in all cases, you should be trying to find a job that isn't shitty so you can stop hating 40 hours of your week. Maybe not your dream job, but at least one you don't absolutely hate.

blackholeon How to Stop Being a Wantrepreneur

I would take this article a lot more seriously if it didn't have "tweet" buttons embedded inside the article itself.

blackholeon No Combat Without Movement: Enders Game as Maneuver Warfare Primer

I've read this book a good 3 or 4 times and it never ceases to amaze me. Ender's Game is without a doubt Orson Scott Card's magnum opus and a must read for anyone remotely interested in science fiction. I always had an interest in the combat tactics employed in the book, and admired Ender's seemingly unlimited ability to innovate, but never realized it had such a concrete grounding in legitimate military tactical theory.

blackholeon I'm Slowly Losing My Mind

And here I thought I was supposed to be the crazy one :3