Hacker News Reader

Is Taco still hacking Perl?

The first thing authoritarian states do is take the guns.

mortyseinfeldon Success at Work, Failure at Home

Your boss can't make you work ridiculous hours

mortyseinfeldon Success at Work, Failure at Home

Each time I read madness as 60h/w, 70h/w or the wtf 80h/w I am really happy to live and work on EU

I'm happy I don't live in EU. I don't have to work 80 hours, but if I choose to then that should be my right. Europe is too anti-ambition and its policies reflect that.

mortyseinfeldon The Techno-Militarization Of America

The only reason to have these types of equipment is because of an "us against them" attitude of the cops. And the "them" isn't just "criminals".

But that's what you get when you vote in folks that demand that government be the center of attention of everybody's lives.

mortyseinfeldon Code faster with Intellij IDEA live templates

It's useful for any language/framework, whether it's verbose or not.

The benefits of functional languages tend to not be as great as they could be because the tooling sucks (or kind of sucks). Look at Scala. The IDEs sucked for years. That's changed recently, but it was a big problem for adoption. F# is similar. Although support is baked into Visual Studio these days, the IDE support is spartan to say the least compared to C# with resharper.

There seems to be a class of developers that have a hard time understanding the enormous productivity boosts that good tooling provides.

mortyseinfeldon Nimrod: A New Approach to Metaprogramming [video]

Wish it were a Intellij plugin and for Clojure instead of Racket. I'd buy it.

mortyseinfeldon Professor on ‘Gilligan’s Island,’ dead at 89

Amazing how time flies. That picture of the cast is from half a century ago.

mortyseinfeldon Google injects Chrome OS into Windows

Luckily I've left Chrome for Firefox nightly. I'm moving all my nontechie family members over to Firefox too. Google thinks they're being cute playing these stupid games, but it'll just hurt them in the end.

mortyseinfeldon Man jailed in UK for refusing to give police USB stick password

They would probably be entitled to asking for your wallet password, yes.

No, they shouldn't be entitled.

mortyseinfeldon Man jailed in UK for refusing to give police USB stick password

Agreed. The guy isn't a sympathetic figure, but this is a horrible policy nonetheless. This is one of those thought crimes to me.

mortyseinfeldon Ditching a Language

It's zero-sum if the tooling around Haskell is antiquated compared to Java's. But the idea that a language is going to make us "that" much more productive has to go. We need much, much better tools.

mortyseinfeldon Ditching a Language

We're still in the dark ages when it comes to software development, and I don't believe it's because we're using Java instead of Haskell.

I believe we need much more powerful tools that help us in understanding large code bases. Tools that can help us visualize what's going on. Tools that can do testing for us. Tools that can rewrite code for us (think Resharper or other Jetbrains refactoring tools), but an order of magnitude better.

mortyseinfeldon Scala – 1 Star Would Not Program Again

With Scala you feel smart having just got something to work in a beautiful way but when you look around the room to tell your clojure colleague how clever you are, you notice he left 3 hours ago and there is a post-it saying use a Map

So he was making reference to Clojure here. That's fine, but you don't have to make things complicated in Scala if you don't want to.

I love the semantics of Clojure, but until you get some optional typing and possibly another syntax baked in forget about it for a whole class of devs.

mortyseinfeldon Germans abandon hope of US 'no-spy' treaty

We saw what happened when Germany "rose up" in the middle of the last century. I guess Germans though the jews were tyrants back then.

mortyseinfeldon India Manages to Free Itself of Polio

A grudge? You're thinking is just as sick and twisted as aTEmpOral's.

mortyseinfeldon India Manages to Free Itself of Polio

Of course the CIA doing its job to track down a murderous thug is somehow "messing with the biosafety" of the planet. Not only that, but according to the sick and twisted thinking of TeMPOral, Bin Laden is a "political enemy". Sure, Bin Laden is just a politician with legitimate differences.

This kind of twisted thinking by TempOral and way too many others like him is what is wrong with the world these days. You should be ashamed of yourself.

mortyseinfeldon New release of Self programming language

IIRC, some of the techniques used in the Self VM eventually made it into the JVM.

Ahh yes, the relevant LtU thread. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1185#comment-12831

mortyseinfeldon India Manages to Free Itself of Polio

As opposed to what, putting him on "trial"?

mortyseinfeldon So, why I have given up flying?

...but what we can't say is for sure how bad things will get or if you are a stupid climate 'sceptic' - how they will stay the same.

Oh, I thought you called people that didn't believe in your religion "deniers".

mortyseinfeldon Down The Rabbit Hole We Go: Mind-Expanding Documentaries

It should be Government is the Crisis, but let's not shake up your worldview.

mortyseinfeldon Female Founders

Once again we have leftists commenting on how dividing people into groups is a good thing because of historical racism, segregation, etc..

It's like 1984 newspeak and clear that's it's a sick ideology.

mortyseinfeldon An Open Letter to HN from EFF, Demand Progress, and Cory Doctorow

Any Good Samaritan law that comes with an obligation is absolutely horrible and dangerous to free societies.

mortyseinfeldon Software in 2014

Clojure isn't new. Not to take a dig at Rich Hickey, but everything he is doing with immutable objects was done more than a decade ago by the likes of Henry Baker (http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/home.html). Of course, everything that has ever been tried at all has been tried in some variant of Lisp/Scheme at one point in time.

Stop while you're behind. Nobody believes that Henry Baker's papers are equal to what Rich Hickey has done with immutable objects. Geez, get a grip on reality man.

mortyseinfeldon Compile Clojure to Objective-C

You're not only wrong, but incapable of knowing that.

mortyseinfeldon Compile Clojure to Objective-C

That's not true. In fact, the CLR port has been around and up to date for years and before ClojureScript.

mortyseinfeldon Mac Pro Late 2013 Teardown

Wow, that thing is freaking cool.

mortyseinfeldon Steam Removes Game 'Order Of War: Challenge' From User Libraries

So you're justifying Steam deleting the game, even though you won't come out and say it.

mortyseinfeldon Steam Removes Game 'Order Of War: Challenge' From User Libraries

You're still missing the point that Steam is "reaching into people's systems" and removing programs.

That said, it's done all the time via apt-get or windows update or other program updates. People think that this rises to a new level though, and given the fact that Steam users are younger, tech-saavy, and more vocal it's no wonder that it's raising a stink.

mortyseinfeldon Haiku meets 9th processor

It's a legitimate question. Haiku was being funded a few years ago and there has to be some kind of mission for a project like Haiku.