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hhmon How to recognise a good programmer

Thanks a lot for taking the time for writing such useful reply.

hhmon About the origins of the equals sign

Thanks a lot, both of you for your replies. I hadn't imagined that Gould could be on that position. I might have asked the wrong geneticist indeed!

hhmon About the origins of the equals sign

Thank you for your interesting replies.

hhmon About the origins of the equals sign

I'm sorry I didn't understand what "closer to the rock face" means.

As far as I know, Dawkins' books give his version of evolution, that is somewhat non-standard and not yet proven. Gould used to write about evolution more as it was widely accepted by scientists on his time. I know they both have disagreements, but as far as I know Dawkins is faster in writing about not very accepted subjects as widely accepted science.

hhmon Chrome, multicore and embarrassing parallelism

Your argument sounds a lot like "64k should be enough to anyone"; I guess we'll only need more and more processing power (and processes aren't necessarily applications, as in the case of Chrome -and you could also be using threads for that matter-, so your argument doesn't follow anyway).

hhmon About the origins of the equals sign

I was happy with Dawkins book until being told, by a geneticist if I remember right, that he wasn't very serious, that Gould was serious reading but Dawkins was not completely so. I'd be glad to know if it's right or not.

hhmon Scons - an autotools replacement and chrome's build tool

Scons isn't new, it's been around for a big while and I've had the opportunity to use it in a few projects. It's a great build tool, I highly recommend it.

hhmon Document startups in chaos as Adobe discontinues Flashpaper

This is an opportunity for Scribd, they can now offer their iPaper for the affected companies (excepting competition, I guess).

hhmon Ask YC: was Google Chrome project really that secret?

I knew the rumors too... but did the competition knew it somehow, or were they in the same state of confusion as the rest of us?

hhmon How to recognise a good programmer

This is an article for recognizing good programmers, so you can hire them, not for other programmers to admire them.

hhmon How to recognise a good programmer

Someone with a hyperbrain who also happens to be a programmer will probably fit most of these criteria - but then, I would say that this is more an indication of hyperbrains being well adapted to programming than of good programmers being hyperbrains.

Touché. If your criteria for good programmers is ok, then you are right.

hhmon How to recognise a good programmer

"We met with some programmers who were passionate, but were obviously charlatans."

And how did you tell the difference? (when it wasn't obvious... or was it always obvious?)

hhmon How to recognise a good programmer

Hi, thanks for answering. I relate this to hyperbrains because it talks about programmers that: a) are intelligent, b) work in a lot of different projects, possibly unrelated, that are usually hidden, c) are passionate, and self-taught. Maybe not(hyperbrains<->your good programmers), but I'm sure a stable hyperbrain programmer would have all characteristics on your list.

Anyway, I don't like the hyperbrain word (sounds too powerful, as if being better than the other brains and I don't like it), though I really like your articles on the subject btw.

hhmon How to recognise a good programmer

Aren't these instructions on "How to recognise an hypermind programmer"?

Edit: I agree that this way you can recognize good programmers, but are all good programmers supposed to be that way, or only hyperbrain/INTP/whatever?

hhmon When programmers can write no more

I'm not so sure about it... the times I felt something like this my creativity was ok for doing other things, just I was blocked for coding in some specific kind of project.

hhmon Thank goodness we don't have downmods on HN

My point of view is that I only care about the quality of articles on the front page. If a downmod button would increase it, I would agree with such proposal, but I'm not sure (as you said) that such would be the case, and anyway I think the flag button does already work in a way like a big down button.

What I do believe is that content can get better if people actively submit more articles (so spending a little more energy in the site), not only by voting the articles in the new queue.

Anyway I have the feeling that the quality of articles in the site isn't always getting worse... these days I'm quite happy about it.

hhmon Thank goodness we don't have downmods on HN

Now, that's a good argument for not having a downmod button. But not having a downmod button for avoiding wasting the people energy? That's what I don't agree with.

hhmon 10 Things Millionaires Won't Tell You

Bill Gates has a mortgage on his house??! Is that real?

hhmon Thank goodness we don't have downmods on HN

I don't agree... I think it's better to have good content in the sites I visit, than to get less than a few seconds a day back for downmodding links. I prefer going to a good library, with many good chosen titles, than to a terrible library, where I have to do the full filtering myself, wasting more of my time by reading tons of useless book titles only to get one or two good ones.

hhmon Mixing Open Source & Business

The author of the article is the creator of the great Ogre 3d engine. His advice is worth reading, as he's very experienced both in creating successful open software and in doing contract work related to it (he explains the results in the article).

hhmon How about a massive catapult to replace the space shuttle

Thank you for your interesting comment.

hhmon Why we bill by the hour

One way to screw hourly billing: you feel compromised to stay in a project until it's closed, but the project hasn't a close date, so it might never be properly closed. But you might actually want to get out of it to do some other interesting or more expensive work, and if your client feels like it, he/she might never really free you from your project. That's one danger of hourly billing for hourly beginners.

hhmon Classic Pac-Man Source Code (commented)

This one is much better commented: http://umlautllama.com/projects/pacdocs/mspac/mspac.asm (for Ms. Pac-man).

hhmon Classic Pac-Man Source Code (commented)

Ms. Pac-Man: http://cubeman.org/arcade-source/mspac.asm and another one: http://www.donhodges.com/how_high_can_you_get2.htm

hhmon Transportation Hack 2.0: Flaw Found Calif.'s FasTrak System

You are right.

hhmon Transportation Hack 2.0: Flaw Found Calif.'s FasTrak System

I didn't say ROT13, it could be ROTx, or it could have a variable x (as with a big key), whatever... the advantage would be to make it slightly more difficult to find the meaning of the numbers in the card. I know security by obscurity doesn't work, but it's better than nothing.

hhmon Transportation Hack 2.0: Flaw Found Calif.'s FasTrak System

Even in a controller card, it's very easy to at least do some Caesar cipher or anything simple like that. They could even do something a little more complex without much troble.

hhmon Y Combinator Article Nominated for Deletion by Wikipedia Administrators

I guess there should be a separate page listing all YC funded companies (if you can have pages listing all characters in tv series, why not companies funded by YC?).

hhmon Real-time tracking of human eyes using a webcam

However, it's quite improbable you'll get an interesting resolution for your movements with a webcam, compared with lasers or other methods. Image-based eye tracking needs to be real-time (so probably inherently low resolution these days), tracks objects that are an important part of the captured image (so you get like a much lower resolution mouse, because of the size of your eyes or pupils compared to the webcam resolution), and needs to compensate for errors so it needs a lot of redundancy in data to generate output (so decreasing the resolution even more).

Anyone working in computer vision can tell me if I'm right or wrong? I've been working in the area in some small projects, but they were extremely related to this eye-tracking stuff.

hhmon Secret blog published in robots.txt file

Very interesting blog I see! Don't think it's only hype because of the title, the content is really worth a read, and no doubt much more interesting than many blogs that get to the front page.