Hacker News Reader

qwphon Record Labels to Sue Vuze, Limewire and SourceForge

Why stop at SourceForge - they should probably sue Dell, Microsoft and Tim Berners-Lee as well, as I heard a lot of people use PCs, Windows and the internet for activities which potentially infringe record companies' copyright...

qwphon Programming Languages and Lambda Calculi

I think this is the non-scribd version: http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/pllc.pdf

qwphon 4 Languages you should learn in 2009

Yeah, that's what the interpreter says... :(

qwphon 4 Languages you should learn in 2009

Python and Ruby are pretty equivalent in terms of what you can do with them. Given a choice between the two, I'd probably choose Ruby, as I personally find it to be less cognitively dissonant than Python.

I'm really not fond of having to haul the self parameter around all over the place in Python, and there seems to be some confusion between what's a function and what's a method. (Some of this is being addressed in Python 3 I think.)

The whitespace thing, I can just about cope with, but I always miss the colons off the end of lines. Oh, and at least on Windows, the supplied documentation is organized in a seemingly arbitrary manner (but at least it has an index if you know what you're looking for).

Having said that, Python probably has a better standard library than Ruby, so, meh, learn both and see which you prefer.

qwphon Hack your brain: OpenEEG

Soldering up a bunch of electrodes, hooking them up to a power source and strapping the whole lot to your head? What could possibly go wrong?

(I'd read this first though: http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/WARNING.html)

qwphon How can C Programs be so Reliable?

Yeah, if you have more tests than actual code, that would seem to indicate something's gone wrong somewhere. And I'd agree that no amount of testing is going to turn an O(n) algorithm into an O(log n) one. There's no substitute for sitting down with a pen and paper and doing some old fashioned design sometimes.

I do think having a suite of repeatable test cases you can run against developing software is a useful thing to have, though. Not only can you test for correctness, but you can also run benchmarks against each modification to see if your performance or memory usage is going up or down.

It probably depends on what you're trying to do...

qwphon How can C Programs be so Reliable?

That's not an exclusive or though. If you have a proof of your code's correctness, I'd still like to see it being regressed against any changes to the code. Ideally the more different methods you have for validating that your code is doing what it's supposed to be doing, the better.

I'm actually quite disappointed to see my original comment with a negative score. I'm going to assume it was just badly phrased, as I don't seriously think that anyone believes that more testing of software results in a decrease in quality.

qwphon How can C Programs be so Reliable?

You can actually use setjmp()/longjmp() to implement that kind of thing, it turns out. Here's but one example:

http://www.on-time.com/ddj0011.htm

I'm almost tempted to make an analogy with scheme's (call-with-current-continuation) here, but I think that might be pushing it.

qwphon How can C Programs be so Reliable?

The stability of any system is roughly proportional to how much automated testing is done against it.

qwphon How can C Programs be so Reliable?

I'm still not convinced that there's anything particularly magical about C here. Reliable programs are written by people who:

* understand the problem domain

* know the implementation language and its supporting library

* pay attention to detail

Admittedly, some languages fit some problem domains better than others, but 90% of the time, picking the language you're personally most familiar with will be as good a choice as any.

qwphon How can C Programs be so Reliable?

If exit() is too abrupt, you can always use setjmp() and longjmp() to set up a non-local jump to an error handler.

qwphon Tell Hacker News: Throwaway accounts

"September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_september

qwphon Ballmer on Android: "Blah dee blah dee blah"

"Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers..."

qwphon Google account disabled for 6+ days. Some thoughts

Sympathies to the OP, but my general rule for all data: if it doesn't exist in two places, it doesn't exist. (A lesson I also learned the hard way.)

qwphon Rainforest Fungus Naturally Synthesizes Diesel

That probably depends on where it is. ;)

qwphon Rainforest Fungus Naturally Synthesizes Diesel

This makes me wonder how many amazing species have been lost through deforestation without us ever knowing what benefits they could have had...

qwphon Tell HN: Vote.

If I ran a newspaper, I'd have both articles already written, so I could hit the press as soon as the result was confirmed...

qwphon Vancouver, Canada Startup Meeting

I'd like to come but I work in Burnaby, so could only do weekends/evenings. I'll send you a mail anyway...

qwphon IAQ on C Programming

I quite like this one:

4.4: People keep saying the behavior is undefined, but I just tried it on an ANSI conforming compiler, and got the results I expected.

They were probably wrong. Flame them mercilessly. Be sure before you do that your compiler is really ANSI conforming, though. If it turns out you were wrong, they get a legal claim on your firstborn.

qwphon Slacker Nation? Young Japanese Shun Promotions

I find it odd that that the more people there are in the world, and the more technology there is, the harder we all have to work. It seems counter-intuitive.

qwphon Things I wish I’d known when I was younger

Youth is wasted on the young...

qwphon The Call of Cthubuntu

I think it's a Halloween special...

qwphon Zed follows up on the search for Matt

I agree.

qwphon The Economist endorses Barack Obama

Bush is a national socialist

That's an interesting choice of words.

qwphon REST is UnAmerican

Hardly anyone knows anything about Karl Marx nowadays...

qwphon A programmer's view of the Universe, part 1: The fish