Hacker News Reader

justanotherbodyon Destruction of large numbers of jobs by robots unlikely, says new OECD Study

By this logic should we have autonomous refueling already?

After factoring in the cost of the robotics I suspect paying humans minimum wage is quite a bit cheaper. Especially given the diverse outdoor environments such a system would need to be maintained in

justanotherbodyon Programming Doesn't Require Talent or Passion

My success at programming congress from a fundamental desire to write better code tomorrow than I did today.

Some may call that passion, but it can come from any number of places. It's not very important why you choose this path, or really how you accomplish it, just that the attitude and (to a lesser extent) outcome are present.

I'm sure others have found success by different means, but this has been a common thread in the small part of the programming community that I've observed

justanotherbodyon VR is a dud – here's why

The article has reasonably valid points though I'm not sure I agree with any of them

1 content is limited now, but is not likely to stay that way forever. The commentary about porn is humorous but unreasonable - vr does not need porn to succeed

2 hardware will get cheaper and lighter rapidly. Also I expect a notable market to develop for vr as an alternative to monitors (which requires about the same space as a pc).

3 kids don't drive $1200 high end gaming pc sales. The vr market the author addresses is not today's market

4 direct-to-brain vr will be cooler than today's tech, but they both have a place

justanotherbodyon Type hints – a mediocre programmer's reaction (2015)

I'm not sure any committee could agree as to what defines a filelike object (does it implement seek?)

In addition you'd need an IRO (interface resolution order) if you truly intended to prove everything would work

To say nothing of accidentally implementing an interface and getting an error because if it

Doesn't sound like my kind of python...

justanotherbodyon \d less efficient than [0-9]

Noted here that modifying \d to only include [0-9] yields \d more efficient http://stackoverflow.com/a/16622773/1943429

justanotherbodyon Paul Graham on Spaghetti Code

You've just proven the point. Commit to the popular language because finding maintainers in X years will be that much easier

justanotherbodyon J.J. Abrams To Direct 'Star Wars: Episode VII'

I normally love to complain about J.J.Abrams, but this could be a great fit.

He demonstrated most of the necessary skill set in Star Trek. It seems unlikely his creation could be anywhere near as bad as Episodes 1 and 2

justanotherbodyon Why we moved from NodeJS to Ruby on Rails

It seems to me a lot of this starts with "I have a general idea, and I want to get it off the ground ASAP" and transitions to "I have a focused idea, and can now revise the project accordingly"

I see nothing wrong with that, as long as everyone involved recognizes the cost of rewriting/replacing large chunks later. If you're on a super tight schedule and don't want to write anything but JS, and you can afford to make revisions later (assuming the thing even catches on!) it strikes as pragmatic.

justanotherbodyon Heavier people should pay more to fly

So you're suggesting that airlines route baggage differently because the marginal increase in passengers' weight is pushing the airplane load past the factor of safety the FAA requires?

In some cases I'm sure that's been the case. In general planes are more limited on volume than lift, as most people don't travel with particularly heavy luggage.

justanotherbodyon Ask HN: What is a reasonable salary for a teenager to have during an internship?

My first job was in IT and would have been an internship if the company regularly hired people (it didn't, this was a special case because of family connections). It was during the summer in high school and paid $10/hour.

In college I had a part-time job doing computer repair/maintenance for a small office at $12.50 an hour, and later had a formal internship at a Fortune 500 company that paid $19.50 an hour

All this took place in the greater Seattle area.

Unless there is a compelling reason to work for free (e.g., difficult industry to break in to, extreme desire to work for said company) I would advocate never working for free if you can get paid. Everyone I've known who worked free as an intern (3 people, perhaps not a large enough sample) were treated unacceptably relative to the atmosphere of a professional office. One basically became 12 people's gopher, filling out uninteresting paperwork and rarely learning anything that added value to their ability to work.

In addition, being paid to work puts one in a position to learn to manage their own finances, if only in part. For me this was easily more important than all the technical skills I picked up.

justanotherbodyon [dead]

The author seems to have bought a Mac without doing any research on how to make the transition. Regrettable, but not exactly a failing of the Mac.

I think this is a really good article for people who don't want to switch from Windows to OS X and still want to be convinced they shouldn't switch.

My personal favorite - "For a second I thought, well, I could load Parallels, the Mac OS program that allows you to run Windows applications on your iMac. But that plan was squashed fast. Before I could complete Parallels' installation, it asked for a copy of the Windows CD. I shook my head in disbelief: where the hell am I going to get a copy of the Windows CD? And if I need Windows to perform basic functions, why don't I just get a PC with Windows already installed?"

justanotherbodyon Ask HN:Should google include tweets and retweets as part of pagerank?

If this happened google bombing would become that much easier.

I shudder to think of what 4chan would do with such power

justanotherbodyon Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

http://releases.ubuntu.com/9.10/ubuntu-9.10-desktop-amd64.is...

substitute whatever particular image you need, it's all named accordingly.