Hacker News Reader

sharmajaion Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

Well I was just a little ahead of my time: https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/75369986163612876... . As it turns out the Autopilot was indeed turned off in the Pennsylvania case.

sharmajaion Tesla confirms “Autopilot” crash in Montana

The Pennsylvania turnpike case hasn't been shown to involve autopilot yet. Tesla's logs have evidence to the contrary.

sharmajaion Tesla Model S Suspension Failures Under Scrutiny by Safety Agency

I thought initially that they did this so as to prevent their "goodwill" from getting misused by other customers. But then I realized their warranty should cover replacement and repair , regardless, for 4 years, 50000 miles [1]. What gives Tesla?

1.https://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/Model_S...

sharmajaion Show HN: Full Stack Lisp – A book in progress about writing Common Lisp apps

I believe this is one of the major goals of http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/

With this book, we want to show you how to use functional programming and Haskell to solve realistic problems. This is a hands-on book: every chapter contains dozens of code samples, and many contain complete applications.

sharmajaion Backblaze Storage Pod 5.0

It is probably unfair to ask, but is there a way to get an early invite for B2 (I already signed up but can't contain my excitement; email: HN username at gmail)?. Also, have there been any comparisons of B2 done with Amazon Cloud Drive's unlimited everything plan for $59 a year (with break even when compared to B2 at around a TB)? They do provide an API, although I have yet to try it out.

sharmajaion How to boost your Vim productivity

No, not without a 'g' at the end.

sharmajaion Spouses of H-1B Visa Holders May Soon Be Allowed to Work in the U.S.

Where do you see that? If that is the case then it helps only those who applied for permanent residency late in their 6 year H1-B term hence they don't have EAD for their spouse through green card application but can extend their H1-B status indefinitely.

sharmajaion Spouses of H-1B Visa Holders May Soon Be Allowed to Work in the U.S.

Link to the whitehouse factsheet announcing this: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/04/07/fact-s...

Relevant excerpt from the section "Attracting the World’s Best and Brightest": These proposed regulations include rules authorizing employment for spouses of certain high-skill workers on H-1B visas, as well as enhancing opportunities for outstanding professors and researchers.

As to what certain means remains to be seen.

sharmajaion Turing's sunflower

Looks like this is what Nest Protect uses for its mesh design: https://nest.com/smoke-co-alarm/life-with-nest-protect/

sharmajaion Everest is littered with dead, exposed bodies [2010]

Life is ours, we live it our way; All these words I don't just say; And nothing else matters

sharmajaion MindMup is now open source

I haven't tested this but I think search engines should automatically be able to index SVGs, thus making the public maps Googlable.

In general I like SVG because it doesn't try to hide the data it's displaying, unlike flash/canvas. Although I now remember seeing a hybrid div/canvas implementation which buys you best of both worlds albeit at some added complexity.

sharmajaion MindMup is now open source

Great work! A suggestion: to make the text searchable using Ctrl-f, please render the maps using SVG instead of canvas. For a big mind map this is indispensable.

sharmajaion Exynos based quad-core developer boards, starting at $69

This is the one at $69: http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.ph...

sharmajaion Neither the Will nor the Cash: Why India Wins So Few Olympic Medals

While you provided an accurate description of the Indian culture, your comment does not address the issue at hand.

The biggest problem according to me lies in the Indian culture; We don't challenge authority enough to pursue our dreams.

In Indian culture most decisions that matter are made for children by their parents. Disobeying your parents has an associated stigma to it. While this being a good thing for holding the families together, and arguably increasing happiness, this can be a deterrent to developing a person's individuality and self confidence.

So while it is difficult for well wishing parents to suggest a high-risk, high-reward path for their children (it's not their dream after all), which involves the child following a sport which he/she is good at, the children's subservience hamper independent thinking required to pursue their dream on their own. IMHO this is the primary cause of the herd mentality that we see so very often in India.

This herd mentality causes a catch22, where prior successes are required in a sport for parent-approved children's participation, and due to lack of participation there aren't any successes.

Of course there are miracles, but unfortunately not very often. For example, I attribute a lot of the participation in cricket and as a result the top class Indian cricket team that we see today, to the miracle named 'Sachin Tendulkar'[1] - one of the best batsmen that the sports has ever seen.

But with the modernization(westernization?) of the Indian culture, things are looking better. Looking at India's history at the Olympics[2], recently we have started seeing successes across a variety of sports - shooting, boxing, and badminton. I hope this trend continues and helps convince more parents to let their children pursue their dreams and not be just another rat in the rat race. And also convince a lot more children that challenging the authority can sometimes be a good thing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachin_Tendulkar

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_at_the_Olympics

sharmajaion A Functional Programming Influence Graph

I did something similar, sometime back, where I used the influences from the information boxes on the programming language pages on wikipedia to generate a global lineage graph. I used SVG as the output format though, since it is much more searchable, zoomable, and linkable. You can see here:

http://jaisharma.info/static/choice/images/projects/lineage.... .

sharmajaion Dart programming language design

Type systems are a form of documentation, and they help enable programming tool support, but their role in error detection is greatly overstated.

This is a blasphemy towards static typing. Whenever the size of a software system stops being trivial, static typing is a must have to assume any kind of robustness. I cannot think of refactoring thousands of lines of code written in a dynamically typed language and sleep peacefully in the night. On the other hand, I can rely on the linker/compiler errors to, at the very least, flag any type misuse introduced due to my changes, in a statically typed one.

sharmajaion C.S. Lewis on Writing

In the essence of the message, I like the more elaborate version, more than "Show, don't tell" which I find just a clever play on words.

sharmajaion Rust - a new programming language from Mozilla

While that is true, taking an initial look at the rust tutorial it seems to me that the number of syntactic rules in the language for Rust are much more than in Go, which is always a negative sign.

sharmajaion Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

You are partially right about C#, my experience with it dates back to the 1.0 version, but even with all these enhancements is it worth spending in the effort of learning two similar languages when you could be learning a different paradigm which will expand your mind in different dimensions and will make you a better programmer. If you are proficient in Java and want to move to .NET why not learn F# instead.

About you comparing CoffeeScript with Clojure is not fair at all. Clojure gives a whole new world on top of JVM, while CoffeeScript is just syntactic sugar for Javascript.

sharmajaion Poll: What's Your Most Disliked Programming Language?

I think for a language to be disliked it should be in one of the following categories:

1) First category is where you are forced to use it, and it is easy enough to get started in. For these languages the programmer base is big enough for the mandatory awkward features of the language be stumbled onto frequently enough to gather all the hate, and also big enough for the language hating to become a pop culture. Javascript, Java, Objective C, Visual Basic, PHP are languages in this category.

2) The second category is where you are forced to use it, but the language takes a long time to master, there are so many rules to learn and practice that unless you have spent 10 years coding in these languages, you cannot call yourself an expert. The hate for these languages is a different kind of hate and it spawns from the programmer's frustration to conquer the language completely. It's anybody's guess that C++ is the language I am talking about.

3) The third category is where you are forced to use it, and learning the language is just an annoyance mainly because it is just a different syntax for a language you have already learnt, and the learning effort that you put in is not commensurately rewarded by expanding your mind by introducing you to new ideas in programming. Ruby (does not add anything to Python), C# (does not add anything to Java), Coffeescript (does not add anything to Javascript) are such examples.

One constant across language-hating is that the programmers are forced to use them, either because their jobs require it (Java, C++, Visual Basic), or it serves a niche where there is (was) no equivalent (C++, PHP, Ruby on Rails, C#, Javascript, Objective C).

Then there are languages like C and Python, which are so freaking awesome, groundbreaking, and so much valuable for their niches that they just simply cannot be hated.

sharmajaion Functional Programming For The Rest of Us

You can do a lot of functional programming in a language where values are mutable.

Sure you can do whatever you want, but if the language does not support things like tail call optimization, non-imperative function definition, writing code in functional style turns out to be a lot slower (due to non-tail-optimized function call overhead) and less safe (due to potential side effects in function definition) than if you are writing it in a functional language with explicit support for these facilities.

sharmajaion Yale Discovers a Fungus That Eats Plastic

Yes indeed it was him.

sharmajaion Yale Discovers a Fungus That Eats Plastic

This reminds me of a YouTube video, I saw within the last ten days here, where a stand-up comedian talks about, how the planet does not need saving, it will find out ways to save itself. I can't find it now though.

Scientists cannot find a way to degrade plastic does not necessarily mean plastic is not bio-degradable.

I have found time and time again, that stand-up comedians are the ones who make the most serious points.

EDIT: Found it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw

sharmajaion Impress.js - a Prezi like implementation using CSS3 3D transformations

This is mind-blowing, I like how he uses transitions to empower content.

The transitions themselves are fantastic and like others in the thread I don't find them fancy at all, in fact I think they add movies like continuity to presentations for cheap, which if used wisely can enable story-telling style of information delivery.

I can see myself using it for info-graphics and tutorials, other than presentations, by making it do non-linear (zooming in/out or using hrefs) flow of content.

Oh now I realize why I liked it so much, it also removes the single most annoying feature of reading content on the web - the constant scrolling and zooming, like readability it alleviates that pain for you, by zooming in to the content that matters the most at this instant.

sharmajaion Why Don’t We Value Spatial Intelligence?

Strange that the author doesn't mention Howard Gardner [1], who pioneered the theory of multiple intelligences [2] which lists spatial intelligence as one of the intelligence form.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Gardner

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligence...

sharmajaion GoDaddy is default registrar for Google Apps Domains

Those big names don't make the internet, we do. They might be what 10^-googol% of the internet.

sharmajaion Design of CPython’s Compiler

This is best read with CPython's source code available on the side for reference IMHO.

sharmajaion Trillion-frame-per-second video

They should use this to demystify the double-slit experiment.

sharmajaion Mythbusters experiment goes awry, sends cannonball through two houses

Agreed. Take http://www.democracynow.org/about for an example.

sharmajaion Mountains and buried ice on Mars

Also 'few pixels' is relativistic in terms of the dpi of your monitor.