HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

didroe

165 karma · joined March 10, 2009

submissionscomments
didroe··on Python and the power of 'first class' everything
>Same for break and continue, and mostly raise

These are all escape continuations.

>which unfortunately I don't have a snappy word on hand for

Abstractions?

didroe··on Dual Screen Laptop
I saw an article recently about projectors that shine light directly into your eye. Mix that tech with a camera to track the location of your eyes and align the projector and you wouldn't need any monitors. You just stick your phone on a desk and get instant augmented reality.
didroe··on Folding Plug System
>wall outlets are usually behind a local fuse even before a home's circuit breaker

I live in the UK and I don't know anyone with fuses in the actual outlet. We normally have a circuit breaker and fuse in the plug. For things like my PC, I also use 4-way extension cords which have an additional fuse and surge protector.

didroe··on The Chroma Hash effect
One thing that's weird in the example is that there's a confirm password box. The only utility I can see for Chroma Hash is in removing the need to confirm passwords. You'd need widespread use for people to remember their hashes though.
didroe··on Why is there still a registry in Windows 7?
Depends on what your definition of registry is. If the current registry is stored in two non consecutive disk blocks (due to fragmentation), is that still a registry? Think of per application files as disk blocks, with the registry API caching those into memory and operating as if it was a single database.
didroe··on Why is there still a registry in Windows 7?
Yeah, the registry is great. It would be much better though if the data was stored in application specific data files. They could still provide a unifying API but make it really easy to remove an application.
didroe··on Inventor's Bike Folds Into Its Own Wheel
You could have a removable chain. Or use a belt and design it so it can fold over or something.
didroe··on Inventor's Bike Folds Into Its Own Wheel
12 seconds in you can clearly see two pedals.
didroe··on IP geolocation is a bad way to select a UI language
Geolocation is bad for detecting the language, the HTTP Accept-Language header is better for that. But Geolocation can be good for localising content. If I'm in Germany and search for fast food, I want to see the results in English (if possible) but they should be about German businesses.

It's impossible to get it right though because you need to decide what the user wants to see localised vs always in their home locale. Maybe another header that you could set per site like "Accept-Content-Locale" or something.

And of course, both the Accept-Language and GeoIP methods fail miserably at determining things like the user's time zone. There really should be a "home" and "roaming" locale system in browsers that sends the preferred language, time zone, localised content preference, and anything else that could be useful in generically customising content. The user could set the locale browser wide or per site.

didroe··on IP geolocation is a bad way to select a UI language
Well you are reading an English language site so the articles are obviously going to be in English. The complaint applies to anyone travelling to a country that speaks a different language. There are also comments from people in other countries who prefer to browse in English.
didroe··on The Miracle of Smalltalk's become:
A good compromise would be if you could specify an object as being "replacable" and then it would have the extra layer of indirection (the table) to make it fast. That way you don't pay a penalty when you're not using that feature and/or don't have to walk the heap. It would also be better for security in that you'd have to explicitly state which objects were allowed to be replaced. You have to think about needing that feature in advance though.
didroe··on My students forged the notes. I turned them into a lesson plan.
The solution to that is a complete change in the way society views education. If education were seen as a lifelong thing and it was the norm for people to pick up new skills then things would be so much better.

The current system forces people to make choices at a point in their lives when they don't even know who they are yet, let alone what they want to do with their lives. Instead of Google's 20% time, we need 20% education time.

didroe··on Why Parrot is Important
I'd be willing to bet that most general purpose languages that are in mainstream use could easily share the majority of their compiler/interpreter code. The main differences are in which combination of features are included and the syntax that you use.

Why put them in hardware? That sounds like an awful lot of extra silicon for every single architecture. Wouldn't it be better to have a higher level software abstraction like Parrot that you just build everything else on top of?

didroe··on $23.3 Million invested in 11 Twitter-Based Startups
It's not just Twitter, it's Bubble 2.0 TM. Everyone seems to think if you have the words 'cloud' and 'social' in your business description then money just magically appears. I can't wait for investors to wise up so we can get back to some form of reality.
didroe··on Admitting that Functional Programming Can Be Awkward
I stand corrected. Don't you still have to do lots of messing around (in comparison to an imperitive language) to simulate state though?
didroe··on Admitting that Functional Programming Can Be Awkward
Just had a skim, looks like the kind of thing I was thinking altough clearly he's thought it through a bit more. Thanks for the link, I'll take a look properly later.
didroe··on Thanks to Twitter, I'm creating my own Twitter
It will have some of the attributes of Twitter, but it is NOT a simple Twitter clone.

Are you actually going to have a business model then? :)

didroe··on Admitting that Functional Programming Can Be Awkward
This is exactly the idea I had a while ago. I was talking with a friend and we were designing a language where you would have pure and impure functions. That way you can easily see what's going on and what to expect but you don't have to jump through a load of hoops when modifying a bit of state would have done the job.
didroe··on Admitting that Functional Programming Can Be Awkward
How do you solve the problems he mentioned in his followup post? He seems to be saying that there are a lot of people going on about how easy it is but no examples beyond simple games.
didroe··on Admitting that Functional Programming Can Be Awkward
Couldn't you do the same thing by just not using global variables in an imperative language? Then you get the benefits you're mentioning without lots of pointless data copying. You just pass a reference to the world object and you can see exactly what's being modified.
didroe··on Admitting that Functional Programming Can Be Awkward
Indeed, it might be sometimes frustrating to pass around state that in C would be directly modifiable, but the benefits are huge.

Such as? Ok, so you get better multithreaded behaviour but now you're copying state all the time and having to thread it though all your functions. Sometimes just updating state is the right thing to do.

Personally, I think a good tradeoff is immutable data but mutable references.

didroe··on Sending null to /dev/null
Conditions can do a lot more than substitute a value. Think of it like an exception in reverse, you can resume with different "types" that cause it to take a different path. And they might pass new data in.

Say you have a function that is basically a loop processing a list of files, it throws some kind of "file not found" error. You could sort the file out and do a resume "try again", select a different file and do resume "diff file (filename)" or do resume "skip".

didroe··on Why Mono doesn't suck
I thought this was the best bit:

>Mono implements an international standard albeit one from a convicted monopolist. If this is a problem, why do people use C, the standard from convicted monopolist AT&T? Mono implements an improved, Free replacement for a proprietary offering. If this is a problem, why do people use GNU (which provided an improved, Free replacement for proprietary UNIX)?

didroe··on Opera 10 Browser UA string format changed to accomodate bad applications
IE compatibility mode is broken. It has two "modes", one of which changes the user agent version and one that doesn't (but still changes the functionality of the browser). Guess where the sniffer scripts get the version from.

The only way to make it work reliably is to look at the window.documentMode property which requires changing your code, thus defeating the point of the compatibility mode in the first place.

didroe··on WSOP payout structure the best yet - golden ratio and constant second derivative
Some Googling has revealed a little more information from Greenstein:

http://www.pokerroad.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6953

didroe··on MySQL: Find records in one table that are not in another - revised
The query optimiser should be dealing with that. If you're doing an outer join and checking for the key being NULL then it can easily see that the operation can be short circuited.

It's all implementation details. I've worked with databases where a NOT EXISTS would run a query for every source row where as an outer join would run through once doing the join and was therefore faster.

didroe··on What database would you use to store (min) 10 billion objects?
I think the point was that the big DBs have better ways to deal with scaling than sharding.
didroe··on Student's Wikipedia hoax quote used worldwide in newspapers
>There are some lazy and irresponsible journalists out there.

It's just the nature of the beast these days. With the revenue slowly disappearing, journalists have to provide cheaper articles. That's why almost every news article is a recycled press release or, like this case, poorly researched.

It's quite sad IMHO; if news is delivered online, there will be a massive dilution of revenue. There may never again be enough money in journalism to do extensively researched articles. Short of people doing it out of the good of their own hearts. Time will tell I guess.

didroe··on Without Warning, Twitter Kills StatTweets
I thought the secret was that there is no business model. :)
didroe··on What's new in Firefox 3.5
Mine too! Scary stuff.
← PreviousPage 3 of 4Next →