Hacker News Reader

euccastroon How I helped destroy Star Wars Galaxies

[In summer 2001] We talked constantly, speculated, made suggestions, argued about how Jedi should work; we were two years from ever even playing and we already had deep and powerful opinions about a game that didn’t exist yet. It was unprecedented.

It was at least a year late for being unprecedented :). I was doing exactly the same in mid-late 2000 with Eve Online.

euccastroon Sebastian Thrun wants to teach you how to program a self-driving robotic car

Instead of checking out the course and then commenting on your impressions you troll the thread so others can spend their time rebating your unsubstantiated, entitled whining. "Unmitigated disaster" is not belittling; it's plain badmouthing. Your messages reveal your attitude more than any qualities of the course, and thus are wasting everybody else's time.

euccastroon Sebastian Thrun wants to teach you how to program a self-driving robotic car

> Well, first off, there was the fact that the "whiteboard" consisted of them writing on notebook paper.

What's wrong with this? Handwriting looks way better on notebook paper than on a tablet or on an actual whiteboard.

The only problem with the AI courses was lack of official programming exercises and, yes, some imprecisions here and there that were not hard to resolve by checking the forums, where they were inevitably brought up and fixed.

euccastroon Handwriting to LaTeX maths

Funny glitch: draw an alpha, get \alpha. Then draw a beta and gamma to the right, without touching or overlapping the alpha, and I get \propto \beta \gamma. I've found it shuns greek letters in general. I get an `x' from by best attepmts at \lambda.

Really impressive and useful, nonetheless.

euccastroon Stanford profs from DB & Machine Learning class are founding a company Coursera

Andrew Ng is the dude of ML Class. Do you mean why wouldn't they collaborate with the dude(s) of AI Class?

euccastroon Cars kill cities

How this was solved in a Brazilian city back in the 70s. Some nice thinking in there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRD3l3rlMpo

euccastroon Python-style generators in Scheme

Stackless-like tasklets and channels:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45561

euccastroon A Programming Idiom You've Never Heard Of

If you've opened that file in the right mode, you can conceivably append to it once you reach its end. Even in read only mode, I imagine you may conceivably seek back for further reading?

euccastroon Python for Humans

You can assign arbitrary attributes to a plain function:

  >>> def f():
  ...   print f.something
  ...
  >>> f.something = 'blah'
  >>> f()
  blah

euccastroon Donald Knuth on how he became good at math

There's a football (soccer) saying: "the most important play is always the next one."

euccastroon Show HN: I Created the Inverse of Angry Birds

Concentration of eggs helps all. Extra eggs will trickle down back to the birds.

euccastroon The Secret History of Kim Jung Il -- written by one of his high school teachers

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5631882395226827730

euccastroon The Secret History of Kim Jung Il -- written by one of his high school teachers

You forget US citizens after WWII. I've seen bigger fuss than Occupy Wall Street over milk prices over here.

euccastroon The Secret History of Kim Jung Il -- written by one of his high school teachers

Done with what? You sure don't think schooling has been "universal" for long before the XX century?

euccastroon Scientists Find Studying For Test To Become London Cabbie Enlarges Brain

Practice deliberately on the stuff for which you want to improve your brain.

euccastroon Six Days without Food: Hacking Your Mind to Make Do with Far Less

(1) having no facts to back the opposite assertion either, I'll take intuition as an heuristic.

(2) I explicitly noted the caveat that taste may be cheated. Now, taste was developed by evolution, and is cheated by the food industry, not (normally) nature. So I wouldn't trust taste of Doritos (artificial) over natural foods, but if I actually like vegetable soup better, I'm not going to look up what's the latest trend on nutrition to assume my choice is healthier.

euccastroon Six Days without Food: Hacking Your Mind to Make Do with Far Less

Fat is where many toxins accumulate. If the animal you eat has been fed with pesticide-ridden, fattening-rather-than-nutritious crap and pumped up with hormones and antibiotics, I bet its fat is not as good for you.

As an heuristic, taste is supposed to be a measure of nutritional quality. Sure it can be cheated, but when something natural tastes better than something adulterated, I'm pretty confident you can rely on that hint.

euccastroon Watch Me Make Mistakes

FWIW[+], two-and-a-half suggestions for playback mode:

- mark the current edit point more prominently,

- automatically scroll to where the edits are taking place (obvious if you test this on a small screen),

- if you implement the former suggestion, signal big jumps prominently in a way that helps viewers keep track of where they are in the overall document.

[+] I know this is an early proof-of-concept for playback mode, and my suggestions are probably obvious, but it can't hurt.

euccastroon How One Missing `var` Ruined our Launch

(I'm no C expert, I'm posting my take on this mainly because I'm interested in learning from counterarguments):

Greatgrandparent's error was lack of such inner declaration. -Wshadow wouldn't help with that.

Also, I imagine enforcing old-style declaration restrictions helps you to avoid introducing those errors in first place, but it's just as hard to debug them once they're in.

My choice would be to get in the habit of declaring a variable in the narrowest scope that makes sense. I can't see much of a problem with this (esp. in the context of C!) barring old habit. I don't think Scheme programmers, for example, have this stuff any easier and I don't think scoping is perceived as a problem there.

euccastroon Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs: correction

My point is, why are there laws that exist to prevent the sort of absurd things I propose? That is, why isn't "if you don't like it then don't buy it" sufficient in those cases?

There is a line to be drawn somewhere and different people may reasonably argue for drawing it at different places.

euccastroon Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs: correction

Not so simple. Let me illustrate in increasing levels of absurdity: if Peach Inc. tried to, say, claim property of any data or content authored, produced or processed with any of their devices, and forbid you from using them in the loo because it damages their image, and claims rights on the organs of your firstborn child when you open some DVD shrink wrap, etc. etc. and I find that aberrant, there is a point at which "so don't use Peach hardware" doesn't settle the issue.

For many people, being forbidden to use a piece of hardware that you legally own in whatever way you want is an unacceptable intrusion on personal freedom.

euccastroon Richard Stallman on Steve Jobs: correction

Do you mean idealistic? I don't think RMS fails to perceive reality, he just thinks fighting statu quo and the current trends is worth it.

euccastroon The bursting of the Bitcoin bubble

Create an account for them, send them the wallet.dat, let them log in and transfer to their own account whenever they want? Or just change password, if that's possible.

euccastroon Occupy George

Bail-outs are a symptom of plutocracy, which is very much the fundamental nature of the American system (amongst many others).

euccastroon Occupy George

It can, if that 1% effectively control the system.

euccastroon Dizzying but invisible depth

Talk about distraction!

euccastroon Why two men committing the same crime get different chances at a parole

Unless in your circumstances it's easier and safer for him to just say yes. In that case go right before lunch, or late in the evening --I guess.

euccastroon Heretical Confessions of an Emacs Addict – Joy of the Vim Text Editor « /usr

Seconded. The direction keys (j, l, I think, and I forget which the other two were; I just kept the mapping from movement-of-fingers to movement-of-cursor) may not be as intuitive as they are in qwerty, but after a short while you just ingrain them in your muscle memory and it doesn't matter anymore.

euccastroon New leukemia treatment "exceeded our wildest expectations"

You're mixing up society with government.

And, by the way, you have not refuted grandparent at all. Much on the contrary, you have only ratified that you have chosen money and lifestyle over working on something you believe in. I don't think gp was judging you for that, only saying that was indeed your choice.

euccastroon London riots / UK riots: verified areas

Actually, as a (just as absurd) heuristic I think the world would be much better off if we killed, say, the 1% richest people every year. We'd lose some people up there with genuine net contribution to mankind, but for the most part we'd get rid of thieves and thugs. The problem with mankind is not lack of good and brilliant folks, but excess of white collar thieves and thugs.

Not that I would propose this seriously. Just seems to me less absurd than what you suggested, which is not saying much at all.