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hazzen

643 karma · joined September 28, 2009

I write code for a living.

I collect personal projects at http://hazzens.com

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hazzen··on Can Java Be Saved?
Personally, I find this boilerplate equivalent to the comments one has to write documenting the requirements of the type, with the added benefit of readable error messages when you pass the wrong type. In other words, I find:

  // T here is a type that must support these two operations:
  //   bool froznit();
  //   void frobnob(Foo* foo);
  template <class T> class Frozner { ... }
And

  public interface SomeStupidName {
    public bool froznit();
    public void frobnob(Foo foo);
  }
  public class Frozner<? extends SomeStupidName> { ... }
To be just as much work to type.
hazzen··on Can Java Be Saved?
Java definitely supports generics as of 1.5 - did you mean that it doesn't support generics to the extent of C++? Most basic uses (containers) are identical between the languages, and while Java doesn't allow compile-time "duck typing" that C++ does, you can fake it by using the "? extends SomeInterface" syntax.
hazzen··on The Big Lie About Twitter
How did you find out about the #profood tag? I am assuming someone you know was either in the community, or interested in the community. This is no different from a wikipedia page referencing the community, a blog you follow pointing you at the forum, or a person you don't even know mentioning it at an event. I do not see why the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch website/blog/weekly newsletter couldn't also point you to this community.

What I am getting at is that Twitter works the same as all these things that have come before, but it is the new and the now and therefore the media darling. I do not debate that it has usefulness, but I do debate that it has impact and change beyond what already existed (in addition to imposing barriers to usability). Twitter does work as a communications platform, but that doesn't meant it is changing the world or a paradigm shift or any of the other breathless praises it has received.

Also, please do not assume I am not a Twitter user just because I dislike the service.

hazzen··on The Big Lie About Twitter
I just did a search on Twitter for #profood. A large majority of it was RT messages. How does one find the discussion that is going on about #profood in all of this? Speaking for myself, I would find it much more efficient if there was a profood forum, blog, or even BBS. Any of these solutions would provide a signal-to-noise ratio that is manageable, and have the bonus of being intended for discussion and discourse instead of requiring users to quote one-another to get a message out.
hazzen··on The Hidden Cost of C++
Do you know how to fix almost every one of these cases for good? Just don't allow implicit copying of your classes. Problem solved. If someone tries to write that horrible code, they can't.

This is more a question of knowing what you are doing and less of C++ sucking. C doesn't solve this - you still have to know what you are doing there or you end up shooting yourself in the foot. I much prefer having an interface with virtual methods to a struct with function pointers.

hazzen··on What problems does Google Wave solve?
I'm not sure if your comment is sarcastic or not - but isn't Gmail a way to slurp/index all the world's emails, text messages, and similar communications? It isn't like a bunch of engineers were sitting around and thinking "Gmail doesn't get us enough user information, how can we make a new one to get more?". Their thought process was (conceivably) more along the lines of "Gmail doesn't quite work how we want it to, what can we do to fix that?". Slurping all of the information out of it is just a nice benefit.

That said, I haven't actually tried to do any work on Wave, so I can't speak for its usefulness. As a pure email replacement, I find it comparable to Gmail, minus the inferior keyboard shortcuts in Wave.

hazzen··on Experimenting with a Neural Network-based Poker Bot
Based on personal experiece, I feel like (2) would not work very well (nor would using a similar idea to test your bot). When real money is on the line, my entire state of play changes. There is a large psychological difference between playing a bot for fun, and playing a bot for money. Playing for fun, I am more likely to place large bets, bluff, test its logic, and in general play loosely. For real money? No thanks.

Note that this is all based on personal experiece, and may not be the common case, but I feel like the average hacker will play to test the bot, not to win.

hazzen··on Introducing Google Building Maker
See the works of Luis von Ahn (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/), specifically his GWAP project (http://www.gwap.com/gwap/). He has created several web games that provide training for machine learning algorithms while at the same time entertaining users and brining them back for more. The games are very successful, and from the talk of his I heard, it sounds like the data is proving useful.
hazzen··on Ask HN: What was the worst bug you've ever solved ?
Try a worse version of this - comparing the results of a floating-point function call where the left operand gets moved into the 80bit fp unit during computation, and the right operand stays in register.

Obviously there is a precision difference between the two numbers, enough to make a < b and b < a return true in a surprising number of cases. The way I ended up fixing it was by putting the result of the function call in a member variable in every struct, pre-computing all of the results, and comparing based on that value.

hazzen··on GNU Screen - A Hacker's Ideal Terminal
You can also just hit "C-a a", which screen will interpret as "send C-a to the terminal".
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