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mionon Ask HN: How to Deal with a Conservative Family?

Maybe too. But I guess I didn't explain it well enough for the sake of brevity. What I mean is, when you do the startup thing, you may end up neglecting certain things, in my case collge. How do you let them know that you're not wasting time when in fact you're investing in a path they do not understand?

mionon P = NP

Meaning you wasted a shit ton of time trying to prove something obvious :)

mionon P = NP

Thus rendering the theory rather "useless". What some people are trying to do by attempting to prove N = NP (and this is the main source of criticism), is to find a way to "hack" nature.

mionon P = NP

This is why I said intuition. What I meant is that N = NP would suggest, for instance, that the amount of effort needed to appreciate a brilliant piece of music (e.g. Mozart, not any music) is in the same "space" of the amount of effort needed to create it.

You can find many examples of things in nature that are "hard to solve" yet "easy to verify".

mionon P = NP

Agreed, it is bit sensationalist. But what if someone proves it and then we realize that even though it can be done in polynomial time, there's some other constraint (like "x^N but N has to be super big") that renders the result impractical?

I think once someone proves it, it will be obvious in hindsight as a lot of people are just ignoring the isomorphisms in nature.

mionon P = NP

The best intuition I've read that P = NP can't possibly turn out to be true, is that if it were, you could write a piece of music as easily as you could appreciate it.

Also, I can't imagine the answer to something as fundamental as this coming out of a hacky solution. There's probably a more elegant, natural way to prove it. And by natural I mean maybe they should start looking outside Turing's theory.

mionon Show HN: Can you give feedback on this Kickstarter, please?

I'm not a woman, nor did I read the entire project description, but it's worth noting that most successful Kickstarters featured a nice, high quality video with playful music.

You could borrow one of those nice DSLR cameras from a friend and shoot something, buy/get some background music online and then get help to edit a short video. It's not that hard and definitely worth it!

mionon Malandragem

The exponent of this lifestyle, the malandro, or "bad boy" (rogue, hustler, rascal, scoundrel), has become significant to Brazilian national identity as a folk hero, or, rather an anti-hero.

A very serious cultural problem I see here in Brazil.

mionon Show HN: A game I've been working on for the last year is out today

Nice, concise and direct description. Great choice of graphics and screenshots too! Really nice work

mionon What 4chan thinks of HN

The jokes are so accurate I'd conjecture there's a huge intersection between the two communities.

Huumm... Except the fact that, arguably, I don't normally conjecture outside HN [1].

[1] I actually want to see what pg has got to essay about this. Just wait until the Arcstar is ready...

Please hold your downvotes I kid, I kid. Most of this (rather funny) criticism is geared towards SV culture in general, I guess, as HN is just a reflection of that plus common nerd/hacker/engineer/smart-kid-outcast behavior. Apart from the idiosyncrasies of large communities that HN is not invulnerable to, I actually have found great content here. And yes, I'm a white college kid in his early twenties with big ambitions, pg is my hero and I don't feel like getting a job at IBM -- that doesn't mean I'm going to chase a $1B exit with Instagram for Squirrels+social+toilets alongside my other rich friends, replacing cancer research with tweets and fucking up the economy while at it. I'm broke and from another country like many people here, and despite the stupid media frenzy, snarky HN comments, bubble or not and so on, I still want to be part of all this. Why? Because I'm young, stupid and want to see what it's like.

I guess this is what the world's greatest engine of innovation looks like: a bunch of young and stupid nerds from another country.

mionon What 4chan thinks of HN

We like quasiquotes and backticks around here.

mionon Fundamental Qualities of Good Programmers

I think the title is somewhat misleading, maybe "What We Teach at Hacker School" would be more democratically accurate. This is a list of acquired skills, i.e. not fundamental. I think the only fundamental quality of a good programmer is that they really, really enjoy programming. When you have this indeed fundamental quality, becoming good is only a matter of time.

I recommend (re)reading "Great Hackers" by pg and (re)watching "Hammock Driven Development" by Rich Hickey.

mionon Show HN: Phynix = Sandbox + Physics + Unix

Thanks a lot for the feedback! My goal is to make a tool you would use to quickly prototype 2D games that involve physics (eg: Angry birds).

Hmmm I see, I'll make sure to change the commands' instructions.

Defaults would be cool, but not fixed right? What if you could click somewhere and the x,y gets pasted in the command box?

Joints come from Box2D (a famous physics engine), they should have fixed length but it's not 100% accurate. Ok cool, when I add the other joint types I'll improve the description!

mionon Show HN: Phynix, a Physics Sandbox with Unix-like Commands

Thanks! Yea actually that's how it worked at first, it'd just eval your input, but now I'm trying to come up with a better/cleaner solution that doesn't involve writing a mini bashscript interpreter :)

mionon Harvestman - Quick and dirty web crawling

Thanks! Didn't know about it, sounded like a cool name for a web crawler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opiliones

mionon Ask HN: Language Focus

Thanks for the insights! Yeah, someone told me it's not that bad but I'd rather stay away from the whole Microsoft stack.

mionon Ask HN: Language Focus

The former!

mionon Some will always say you're wrong

Awesome as always, Derek is truly a well of wisdom.

I was analyzing the psychological reasons behind this by introspection, and I think there's something to do with your brain trying to repel every little thing that is different from you somehow. It's there for a reason, so I guess that was probably useful 50,000 years ago.

I've realized that whenever you're trying to convince someone or trying to make them understand you, the way to do it is by showing them that deep deep down, you're not so different after all. I really wish more people would realize this. For instance, when you think about a thief, your mind says "Man, I really hate that guy. I would never do such a thing". But maybe he was just trying to feed his family. And that is something you would do.

mionon 10,000 Hours of Practice Won’t Make You an Expert

This. I feel like clapping somewhat like this: http://24.media.tumblr.com/7e5dfa0b74481478ee0953944bbc502f/...

mionon 10,000 Hours of Practice Won’t Make You an Expert

"Thought cancer", perfect! I always wanted a term like this to describe it. Definitely agree, even if there's such thing as raw natural ability, I dont think the lack of it is among the major reasons people fail. Succes is like a fire, there's no "rule", it can result from several different things and it's very complex. Trying to oversimplify it like the author does can only do harm.

mionon My takeaways from "Clean Code"

No state there, just keeping functions relatively simple in terms of their inputs.

Yes, yes! I definitely agree but what I meant is "principles of functional programming outside functional languages". When you understand the trade-offs that these principles bring to the table, you can apply them in OO languages -- in some cases. But here he's banning it for good with that statement!

mionon My takeaways from "Clean Code"

Hmm, true. But a lot of performance optimizations (and the example I had in mind) avoid method invocation. Inside a critical loop, for instance, stacking function calls can make a big difference on a dynamic language. Macros could solve this problem though.

mionon My takeaways from "Clean Code"

And also this:

- Comments are fails

Sometimes you rewrite code for performance, making it fast but awful to understand. Comments are very useful in this case.

mionon My takeaways from "Clean Code"

Nice article! But I have to disagree with these:

- Minimize the number of arguments

- Avoid output arguments

Basically, you're arguing against some principles of functional programming, advocating the use of state. There's no good or wrong with state, I think, there's only a trade-off. Heavy use of state = easier/faster to code, harder to debug/read.

IMHO these kinds of generalizations are pretty dangerous. We should always try to understand the problems lying underneath in order to correctly assess the trade-offs. A quote from Elon Musk that goes something like "don't rely on analogies, try to understand the problem" popped up on HN some other day, but I'm too lazy to go look for it now. :-)

mionon Ask HN: What are some books that changed how you think?

Influence by Robert B. Cialdini

You'll learn about the several "weapons of influence" many people have used and still use on you (and you use on people) sometimes without even knowing. It also gives you great insight into sales.

I highly recommend it for a technical person.

mionon A note to myself

Nice. I find that keeping a little ledger on top of your desk and writing down every idea that pops in your head is also a very good habit. And you often realize "some great idea you had wasn't that great at all" (pg).

mionon Tailgating YC

I knew almost for sure pg or someone from YC was going to answer something like this.

This man has probably overseen the early days of more successful startups than anyone else in the world. That huge amount of heuristics (pratical experience) loaded in a single head is the reason I listen to what he says. He's wise.

But wise does not mean "he who gets it right every damn time". I guess there's likely a psychological explanation as to why we love opportunities to pick on the flaws of successful people. "Hey look, pg made a mistake! Ha, I knew he wasn't god!"

mionon Kiln

This is awesome, great work! However, and I don't mean to be rude, lemme just give you a tip about your documentation.

I'm not a "documentation expert" or anything, but IMHO I'd say there is too much information on your "landing page" and not a clear "call to action":

- How about some installation instructions?

- Basic usage? (addressing the main features, those which most users will probably use most of the time) If I were you I'd put the details about plugins somewhere in the Wiki.

I don't have a lot of spare time to check out your thing, so the project becomes increasingly unattractive as I have to waste more and more time to figure out how to use it / how to get it up and running for a basic test.

Again, IMHO, I believe this applies to most hackers, and to open source documentation in general. Very often I see great hackers who can code 1000x better than I do, but fail to write 'attractive' documentation for their projects.

mionon JavaScript is Not Web Assembly

With all the interesting things going on right now on planet Earth, it amazes me that a post about "The Correctness of JavaScript Analogies" makes it to the top on HN.

mionon Ask PG: Did the "apply to YC without an idea" experiment work?

I'm not a chef but I can taste food.

That's an unfortunate simplification. Without a technical background, you wouldn't know how long it takes to make a basic CRUD app. "3 weeks? Ok I guess. Oh, 3 months actually? Ok I guess." And what about performance, scalability, costs, etc? You'd have no clue.