Hacker News Reader

gngealon Why Class?

What three important traits? If you're talking of "inheritance, abstraction, and polymorphism" that you've mentioned, then I'd like to observe that inheritance is orthogonal to OOP, abstraction is essentially named definitions as a language feature (see Abelson, Sussman, Sussman, 1996, Chapter 1), and polymorphism, again, is found in many non-OOP languages, such as Haskell, for example.

gngealon Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

"Lol!"

I think you're in the wrong place. Reddit is this way.

gngealon Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

"but it is far from a failure"

CS-wise (and design-wise), it's very much a failure. It's a market success, though - just like VHS was, many years ago. ;-)

gngealon Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

> You're making the mistake of conflating PHP the language with Rails the Framework.

I've heard someone call PHP "the C web framework". I thought it was fitting, and in addition, it seemed that even as a C web framework, it was a failure.

gngealon The Internet mystery that has the world baffled

It's quite obvious from your very own quote that it's the author of the article who's confused about the three (!) different notions of unindexable contents larger that the indexable one (deep web) vs. anonymous p2p file sharing networks (darknets) vs. Tor hidden services. I'm tempted to call this "a confusion hat-trick". ;-)

gngealon People Don’t Actually Like Creativity

Except that, most creative ideas are bad.

If you never fail, you're not trying hard enough to do stuff that's appropriately difficult for you.

gngealon How can C Programs be so Reliable? (2008)

> Now put the url fetch code into a larger application. With exceptions this is pretty easy - you can catch any exception thrown by your url fetch code and then retry it a few times until it succeeds, or you inform the user of the app. Without exceptions this is tougher as you need to unroll everything manually in order to retry.

Unless you have something like goroutines - or Erlang-style processes - and perhaps employ a moderately disciplined coding style. Retrying those is just a matter of relaunching them, isn't it?

Also, Common Lisp got exceptions mostly right. Many other languages...not so much, I guess.

gngealon This MIT 3D Shape-Shifting Project Called Inform Will Blow Your Mind

"Gramatically challenged?" Where exactly?

gngealon One Woman's Dangerous War Against the Most Hated Man on the Internet

The issue here (and my reaction was pertaining to that) is that no number of hardware replacements will make the problem go away. The solution is to use hardware that can't be infected in this way. If an OS can infect the firmware in this fashion, it's a security hole by design. Replacement by other crappy HW is a worthless step.

gngealon 16 years after a mass suicide, the webpage is still up

This kind of hidden text seems trivial to exclude. Does the phrase being searched occur in a parseable sentence? If not, penalize the result. Also, it's trivial to deduce that the text doesn't display; that alone should make it excludable from any and all searches.

gngealon One Woman's Dangerous War Against the Most Hated Man on the Internet

"My computer had been bombarded with viruses, and a technician had advised me to buy all new equipment because the malware was tough to remove."

I assume the technician was coincidentally also a salesman. ;-) "Tough to remove"? What a load of crap.

gngealon Life of solitude: A loneliness crisis is looming

They got it from an anonymous source, obviously. ;-)

gngealon Aluminium: The metal that just keeps on giving

"Budoucnost patří aluminiu!"

-- Jára da Cimrman

gngealon Facebook puts bounties on bugs in the D programming language implementation

Go is a language. There's no problem with dynamic loading as such; it's just that the primary implementation uses static linking for convenience. You'd simply have to write a dynamically loading runtime (and come up with some semantics for dynamic loading, which sounds tricky but probably can be handled somehow). The simple-yet-efficient model of implementing Go would require some things to be taken care of - for example, the method dispatch tables.

Also, "Android only uses dynamic loading" - given the existence of NDK, how is that true? As far as I know, you can link statically whatever you want.

gngealon Facebook puts bounties on bugs in the D programming language implementation

...which is of zero importance to the primary users of Go, i.e., Google, as they have a unified code base.

But nobody prevents the Gccgo people from implementing their implementation differently. (It's just that for Google, this is really not a pressing issue.)

gngealon For true panoramic images, toss this camera in the air

Why not 3D, in fact, if it had accelerometers and gyroscopes? Just throw it at around 45 degrees of elevation, capture photos during flight at a few fps, and post-process the results for a 3D scene reconstruction. (You'd have to design it much more durable for that mode of operation, of course.)

gngealon Jeremy Hammond sentenced to 10 years for Stratfor leak

10 years doesn't strike me as unreasonable.

...while in Norway, you typically only get the maximum 21 years of imprisonment for multiple murders. And even that is apparently with the possibility of an early release after 14 years and unsupervised weekend parole after 7 years. And even with murder on your hands, they just might send you off to Bastøy to rehabilitate yourself properly. And somehow, the crime rate in Norway is still much lower, as are the reoffending rates.

I just wonder, what comes next in the US, two years for littering, perhaps?

gngealon Process videos in browser using FFmpeg compiled to JavaScript

If you combine fixed-point arithmetics, tiled memory access patterns, asm.js, and dynamic image processing pipeline compilation (the way that, for example, VirtualDub did it), you'll probably discover that the "slow single-threaded language" probably isn't slow at all for image processing tasks. (And WebCL is still on the horizon.)

gngealon Renault ships a brickable car with battery DRM that you're not allowed to own

It seems to be called a "pod", actually: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...

(I wonder if the Internet connection makes it an iPod. ;-))

gngealon Americans’ Personal Data Shared with CIA, IRS, Others in Security Probe

So the dumb people who get caught looking for that information get screened out, but the smart dangerous people who happen to learn how to avoid having problems with a "lie so-called-detector" test will pass with flying colors? How does that help?

gngealon The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone

No, but I don't see any flaw in that design. Indeed, it seems like the case of Hoare's "obviously no deficiencies" in a system design.

I believe that the GreenArrays people, setting aside the $450 dev board, also had some notes on making cheap breadboards with their chips or something like that. I don't have a link handy, though. ;/

gngealon The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone

In practice such a hard realtime guarantee can only be met by a devices like an FPGA.

There have always been fully deterministic CPUs around for that purpose. The simpler the system, the better; just hook a Forth chip to a memory without caches and you're set.

gngealon Heirloom Chemistry Set

Yeah, but the lack of chlorine trifluoride is a deal breaker. ;/

gngealon Ask HN: Is C++ still worth learning?

I'd use a Chuck Moore reply - "I wouldn't". :-) (Why would anyone do anything so unreasonable?)

gngealon Ask HN: Is C++ still worth learning?

Your line about C++ not having enough features is cute-sounding but actually it's anti-intellectualism under the religion of minimalism.

First of all, it's not my line, it's Rob Pike's line. Second, upon seeing how the C++ people intend to fix deficiencies of C++ by throwing even more features at it, it's very difficult to see it in any other way. Third, the only "anti-intellectualism" I see here is named C++: It's actually symptomatic of certain organizations that instead of trying to see the big picture and really fix things in a systematic way, they "anti-intellectually" hack and tweak and tinker and micro-optimize. For example, IBM has been doing that in the 1960s with their HW architectures before they got their shit mostly together, which is why the ACS project failed, only for it to be rediscovered forty years later, with modern CPUs finally (!) utilizing these ancient but very well working techniques, such as superscalar out-of-order design that will celebrate its fiftieth birthday in a few years. Now, the same breed of people who ditched ACS in the 1960s are apparently in charge of design of mainstream languages. I wonder if we'll survive the next decades in good mental health before enough people realize the same thing again, ditch that crap and start all over again.

gngealon Ask HN: Is C++ still worth learning?

Well all of those solve concurrency and scale problems in the VM and build a language on the top.

I think you're quite mistaken here. These languages solve concurrency at the language semantics level, and then, some of them implement the semantics in a VM, but the VM (in case of Erlang, no Go implementation in use has one) is a tangential issue. To say that these language "solve concurrency problem in the VM" simply doesn't make sense. Languages are languages, they are not implementations.

C++ is just a language in which you are free to build those abstractions into in any form you choose.

Well, there's Turing completeness, and then, there's actual usability. Consider transactional extensions, for example. Haskell gives you a type system for that. In Lisp, you could achieve the same using a code-walking macro library. C++ gives you...what, pattern-matching based template metaprogramming? Ugh! The "language" for that, while Turing-complete, isn't even identical to the one used for run-time code. I've seen a factorial written that way. I don't want to imagine how more complex code like that must look like in C++. Even D is better at that!

If that wasn't possible, then our SQL server installation (all c++) wouldn't quite happily run a single process on each of our 48-core nodes with 128Gb of RAM, nor would it cluster and replicate amongst all 8 of them and deliver 10,000 queries a second whilst yawning.

I didn't say it's impossible in C++. It's just that it's masochistic, that's all. You could easily argue along the same lines that COBOL is a well-designed language because millions of applications have been written in it that power the reliable day-to-day operation of banks you've invested your money into. Yes, they have been written, but at what human cost?

Rob Pike is pretty cool but has blinkers on as he's a captive research executive rather than someone with dirty hands on the ground in some enterprise outfit.

"Captive research executive?" What does that even mean? He certainly has more than enough of his share of dirty hand, while continuing doing so even today, and I won't even comment on that "enterprise outfit" nonsense.

gngealon Ask HN: Is C++ still worth learning?

If you're writing high performance software

That sounds like a red herring. Can C++ be easily compiled for heterogeneous architectures and distributed systems? Does it support massive concurrency in the Erlang/Go style? Is it easily and efficiently vectorizable the way that APL was once? Somehow I've always felt that C++ can do "anything" at the cost of "being equally bad at everything". Regarding C++11, I really like Rob Pike's comment on how the creators of C++ seem to think that the problem of pre-C++11-C++ was that "it apparently didn't have enough features".

gngealon The Big Data Brain Drain: Why Science is in Trouble

Anyways, I wonder if there is any explanation of this phenomena.

It's the basic principle in real-world science that for stuff, people get credited who didn't invent/discover it. That's the reason why your submission wasn't noticed; you simply would have had to wait for the Nth time around.

gngealon Pitfalls of Startup Team Building

Before I clicked that link, I wondered why slides, of all things, should be the pitfall of startup team building. ;-)

gngealon MariaDB 10.0 Beta launched

> I am pleased to see that the traditional SQL databases are still advancing. Having used various NoSQL databases, I always miss the declarative nature of SQL.

And I bet you haven't seen Datalog yet. ;-)