Hacker News Reader

chanchoon On Tesla's induction motor

15 minutes? Are you kidding? It takes that long to get your oil changed and most people can't even be bothered to do that every 3 months / 3000 miles.

chanchoon The Mirah Language: bringing modern features to the JVM without runtime overhead

Pascal uses the "param : type" syntax, although I'm not sure it's the first language to do so. I believe it's older than ML. It's funny to "see this more frequently lately" as it's a really old convention. What's old is new again, I guess...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(programming_language)#P...

chanchoon Detroit is Dying… Quickly

So awesome that the first image on that page is of a marquee for a band from Shitsville McNowhere (i.e. Sacramento.) Makes me so proud.

Just kidding. The heart of rock and roll (and r&b and techno and hip hop, etc) is in ... yadda yadda ... DETROIT!

chanchoon GNU Octave 3.4 has just been released

I don't understand why the computer vision community is so locked in to matlab. Sure it's a great tool, but it's only marginally better than what the python community has to offer (that margin being the network effect I'm about to rage against) and it's damn expensive. You'd think the high cost and vendor lock-in would be off-putting to academics (the discounts are such a transparent ploy.) I mean, what good is it releasing some code under the GPL when you need a $2000 system (plus a handful of toolboxes at $1000 a pop, plus maintenance fees) to run it.

What's particularly galling (to a matlab hater like me, anyway) is how some of the most highly-cited and useful work that's made available by researchers is done so only through matlab. The de facto standard benchmark for keypoints (http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/affine/) is a matlab function, but it's not like that code uses matlab in any interesting way, it just reads text files. And even though it's not computationally intesive (the benchmark is only on small set of images) there is a mex function involved to do the actual computation, which makes it a pain in the ass to use with octave. Basically they're using matlab as a $2000 bash shell. Same situation for the standard segmentation benchmark (http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/vision/bsd...) And then there's LabelMe (http://labelme.csail.mit.edu/) the "open" annotation tool. They've got a really slick javascript UI for crowdsourcing ground truth collection for image segmentation / object classification tasks. They make the data freely available (which is awesome) but to access it you have to go through a matlab toolbox...? WTF?! I mean really, you've obviously got someone on your team who knows a thing or two about the web: take a page out of Flickr's playbook (after all they've done for the CV community) and make your data available via open standards. There's not even a goddamned download link on the page. It's like they're on the Mathworks payroll.

Grrr...

chanchoon Who Is Marrying Whom

So ... you've come full circle back to prescriptivism then? Great, now you just have to get on the faculty at Oxford and you can foist your opinions regarding correct usage of the English language on the world. Or failing that, you can work your way on to the editorial board of the newspaper-of-record of major Anglophonic nation, like, I don't know, the New York Times.

chanchoon Who Is Marrying Whom

Thankfully the Mexicans don't get as upset about our appropriation of the term "United States", as they have just as much claim to it. (Estados Unidos Mexicanos) Otherwise, we from The Land Between Mexico And Canada would have nothing to call ourselves that doesn't ruffle someone's feathers.

chanchoon Tutorspree (YC W11) Is An Airbnb For Tutoring

"Founded by ... the startup is disruptive in the sense that the tutoring space up until now has been monopolized by..."

Tech journalism bingo in one sentence!

chanchoon Arrays considered somewhat harmful

What's an example of "more fine grained control"? I've used C++ more than Java or C#, but it's not apparent to me how removing a language feature gives you more fine grained control.

A const reference in C++ is like an interface that doesn't have any mutating methods, except that all the methods of the interface have the same names and signatures as the original, and I don't have to actually type out a separate interface definition, I just choose which methods I want to appear in both the immutable and mutable interfaces by appending a "const" to their signatures (bonus: if the implementation for the const version is different, I can overload it.)

Sure, C++'s const has tons of problems, but it seems like the Java and C# designers looked at it and said "const is probably more trouble than it's worth so let's not bother." Which is a fair assessment, I guess.

chanchoon Arrays considered somewhat harmful

Are there any other such data structures besides arrays and hash tables? (That's only half-rhetorical. I'd love to hear about one.) If so, are you seriously suggesting that when an array fits the bill, we should stop and think "hmm... maybe another data structure would be a better container for this dense, contiguous set of integer keys"?

chanchoon Our Superficial Scholars

Hmm, that's kind of strange. There's so many important socio-political dilemmas for young people to grapple with these days, why would the author fault them for not being ambivalent toward nukes and armed conflict? Shouldn't young people be forgiven for holding the unequivocal yet naive belief that we shouldn't kill each other, or even threaten to? I mean, if they're equivocating on nukes when they're a fresh-faced 22, what will they be equivocating on when they're a grizzled 55 and at the reins of some real power?

get's to bottom of article, reads that author represented NM in the house...back up to the byline...

Fucking Heather Wilson. Should have known...

chanchoon [dead]

It's a quote from the page, the last bullet in the list of features.

chanchoon Chinese Mothers

Push your children to succeed. Don't let them give up at the first impasse, because kids really can be lazy if you let them get away with it.

Take that sentiment and mix it with some freedom: Instead of making them play the violin/piano and study pre-med, let them choose their goals. "Want to be an actor? Great! But you're going to be the best actor in that play and I won't tolerate anything less." "Guitar? Sure! ... You're not coming out of your room until you nail Stairway."

Not all Chinese folks are as psycho as this gal. A Chinese guy I worked with told me that he put it to his son this way: "You can do what ever you want, I just want you to excel at whatever you do."

(on the balance, though, this essay is garbage.)

chanchoon Chinese Mothers

Selection bias. The author is published because she ended up a professor at the top law school in the country. Plenty of Chinese mothers raise mediocre children, and they don't get to write opinion pieces in Murdoch rags. (Or did you take it literally when she claimed that Chinese children don't get B's?)

But you're right that this parenting style has benefits. It strikes a chord with me, as a parent of small children, when she says that you're not doing them any favors by letting them give up. But parents have to find the right balance. Maybe the author's children benefited from having both kinds of parents, one strict and Chinese, one doting and Western---Cue shock and horror from Chinese grandparents. I know many successful children of mixed East/West families. Sure, that's anecdotal evidence, but so is this article.

chanchoon Trimensional: 3D Scanner for iPhone

If it were that easy, the eyebrows and lips would be sunken inward because they are darker then the surroundings.

More like (I'm guessing) it uses the change in reflected intensity with respect to the change in light position to estimate a surface normal (e.g., forehead is the same for all light positions, left side of your nose is bright when the left light is on, dark when the right light is on, right side of nose vice versa, etc). It then finds a surface that agrees with these normals by solving a partial differential equation. Clever, not simple. (Although I guess it's a compliment to say they make it look easy.)

chanchoon Follow-Up to "Haskell and the 'foul stench of cargo cult mathematics'"

People can disagree on the precise definition of terminology, which is why, in any serious discourse, you have to define things before you begin discussion. The great thing about Haskell (or any programing language) is that you really have to define things. Jargon doesn't compile.

Nevermind the "real" definition of this or that esoteric concept. If you ask N category theorists you'll get N answers. Just import one that works for you and you're off.

What seems to have gotten this fellow is that either the definitions in the Prelude/libraries didn't match his expectation, or (more likely) he was surprised by the inconsistencies between GHC and GHCi (which I also find annoying.)

chanchoon Stealthy Government Contractor Monitors U.S. Internet Providers

Its mission: to use a variety of intelligence-gathering efforts to help the government attribute hacking incidents.

And whether that massive data gathering violates privacy? The organization says it never looks at personally identifying information

If it's not personally identifying then how is it useful for attribution?

chanchoon The Smartphone Explosion

I think Fred's point was that it's an entirely new market opening up. As you say, a middle-class value-conscious market. It will be a huge market, so businesses need to get out in front of it. But replicatorblog's point (as I understand it) is that iOS will still own the high-end of that market, and that segment is worth more $$$ than its number's suggest. If you're in control of the high-end, you can exert undue influence on consumer mind-share and developers. That matters for something.

Anyway, IMO this is not an iOS-vs-Android issue. New markets are going to open up, Android will be there. iOS will still be a cash-cow. Win-win, everybody celebrate (except Microsoft)

chanchoon The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time

For every one of you there is another who dropped out of a PhD program to start a company that eventually went bust and now they are in the same position as you, but without the PhD. Everyone tosses the dice. Everyone has regrets. Don't beat yourself up about it.

Look on the bright side: your PhD is an insurance policy against ageism. When you are 50 you will still be able to find (or make for yourself) low-risk, high-paying work doing neat technical stuff. The VP and C-level peers that you envy so much now will essentially be managers for the rest of their lives.

chanchoon WakeMates are ready

Any users with small children care to share your experiences? Is it even worth the bother, given that huge uncontrollable variable in your sleep habits?

chanchoon C++0x - the next ISO C++ standard

Do you need to pass C++0x to graduate or something? If it's too difficult, don't learn it. There are plenty of non-C++ jobs.

chanchoon C++0x - the next ISO C++ standard

On what distributions do you find ancient versions of boost but recent versions of GCC? If the standardization process moved faster you'd still have to wait.

chanchoon Apply for a Google Cr-48

Wait 13 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#FORTRAN_77

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#Fortran_90

chanchoon This is the Google Chrome OS netbook keyboard -- Engadget

I hope Chrome OS has an option to swap ctrl and search.

chanchoon Armin Ronacher: Collections in C

I used this library a while back, and it was nice at first, until I noticed that his quicksort always picked the first element as the pivot, which makes it O(n^2) on already-sorted input. Then I started second guessing everything, and when you do that with a library you may as well write it yourself without the CPP hackery. At least then the compiler errors will make sense and you can debug it.

I went to go check out the code to see if this issue had been fixed, but the download link has gone bad.

I mentioned this library on HN some years back, when I was still excited about it, and the reply I got was something like "No! Not that macro boneyard!" He was right.

chanchoon On Hiring Haskell People

This is an interesting read. One part jumped out at me (sorry for the long quote)

The purpose of the technical problem was to assess more directly candidates ability to write Haskell programs that can be used to solve real world problems, where memory usage and performance are important. The problem was all about evaluation order and memory behaviour. We started by asking candidates to look at a short program and say what shape they would expect the heap profile to be. That would then lead on to a discussion of what things are evaluated at what stage and how much memory they are taking in the meantime. For the final step we asked candidates to rewrite the program to run in constant space. We felt overall that the technical problem was quite useful and we allowed it to become a significant factor in our final decision making process.

The choice of problem is based on our belief that a good understanding of evaluation order is very important for writing practical Haskell programs. People learning Haskell often have the idea that evaluation order is not important because it does not affect the calculated result. It is no coincidence that beginners end up floundering around with space leaks that they do not understand.

I've written a lot of C++ and a fair amount of Haskell, and this kind reasoning about the evaluation order and space usage of Haskell a program is no less of a black art than pointer arithmetic or manual memory management in C++. In both cases, it's too steep of a learning curve to just be able to write practical programs, which is why garbage collected languages have displaced C++ in many domains.

It's particularly damning to say that "good understanding of evaluation order is very important for writing practical Haskell programs" because the easiest evaluation order to understand is strict evaluation order. In that sense, lazy evaluation is to strict evaluation as manual memory management is to garbage collection, except that the latter is supposed to be an improvement on the former.

chanchoon Breakfast is Overrated

This is a great comment and I appreciate the links.

But the caveman explanation for health and nutrition always leaves me cold. Yeah ok we can pretty much gauge what proto-humans ate and why it was good for them, but what if it made them miserable? It's romantic to think that early humans lived in the garden of lo-carb eden, but what if it really fucking sucked? What if they were just plain hugnry all the time, it was miserable and only the strong survived?

Don't get me wrong I think most of the conclusions are right, but I prefer evidence collected from modern people to justify those conclusions. Appealing to evolutionary biology is only valid for survival and reproduction. It doesn't say anything about happiness, fulfillment, etc.

I seem to recall some crackpot theory that low-calorie diets (ie., borderline starvation) increase your lifespan. That would certainly jive with the caveman hypothesis, but does it sound like fun? How miserable are we willing to make ourselves for a few extra years in a nursing home? That's probably a false dichotomy, but you get the point.

chanchoon Anic -- Faster than C, Safer than Java, Simpler than *sh

And just like a year ago, there's nearly 100 comments about whether or not the syntax is ugly, whether or not you find it readable because you can't break out of your Algol mindset, whether or not anything can truly be "faster than C", whether or not C is easy to parallelize, the url spells "panic", etc etc, and yet there's only 1 or 2 people that bother to look at the commit log and browse the source tree to find out that it's total fucking vapor.

Pretty embarrassing for HN to be so reliably trolled.

chanchoon Jury finds Minn. woman owes $1.5 million for sharing 24 songs

"The statutory copyright penalties were clearly written with commercial-type infringement in mind"

The whole "these bits are worth $X each" scenario becomes meta-absurd when you consider commercial infringement. At $60K/song, The Pirate Bay would be on the hook for more money than the Earth could produce before it was consumed by the sun.

chanchoon Are You A Pirate?

Probably has more to do with the visceral pleasure of accelleration (cf. amusement parks) than the risk of death. Otherwise Russian Roulette would be a more popular extreme sport. It sure is more accesible.

chanchoon Use Vim Like A Pro

Ctrl-c and ctrl-[ are not the same. There are times when latter completes the insert session (same as esc) while the former aborts it, e.g. visual block insertion with (ctrl-v jjjj I)

Also, the happy haacking keyboard already puts control in its proper place and puts esc where ~ normally is, which is close enough that you don't really need to remap it. Best vim keyboard ever.