Hacker News Reader

sophiston GLASS: Gemstone, Linux, Apache, Seaside, Smalltalk

GLASS, truly a name that connotes rock-solid system architecture.

sophiston Donate to help a MySQler

Of course. I was merely making the point that it's manipulative. Not that it shouldn't be.

sophiston Minimalism (computing)

Yea, good thing we never have to sell software to people who don't care how elegant the code is...

sophiston Who's Going to Fund the Next Steve Jobs?

I think only western culture can produce someone with that kind of boldness and lack of humility.

sophiston Donate to help a MySQler

So you're saying they didn't intentionally compose this picture in such a way as to increase the likelihood that people will donate?

This is not hacker news. There are lots of kids out there who are in just as much need of help. This one just happens to have a father who works on an open source product.

sophiston Donate to help a MySQler

Wow, that picture is really manipulative.

sophiston 8 Mathematic Tattoos You Need to See

Right. Because a tattoo becomes less idiotic of you use equations instead of skulls or random chinese characters.

sophiston Ask HN: what language should I learn next?

Exactly. For maximum outsourcing utility you should learn Kannada or Tamil instead.

sophiston Documentation or death (or: the rise and slight drop of rails blogging)

This could be the best-written, most well thought out blog in the history of the internet, but I will never know because I can't get bast the title.

sophiston Linus Torvalds on security

It is possible to speak your mind without being crude and callow, actually.

sophiston Linus Torvalds on security

Is it a job requirement for tech super geeks to have the maturity of a high-school kid?

sophiston Coolest 2GB ThumbDrive Ever

I didn't downmod you, but I believe your post is being downmodded because it has no content.

sophiston In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

The classic nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate. The problem with your argument is that it's simply not backed up by evidence. There are plenty of cases of children who grow up in virtually identical environments, yet go on to have widely varying interests. My brother and I grew up experiencing basically all the same stimuli: same parents, same TV shows, same music, same magazines, same everything. As adults we couldn't be more different.

There's more to this picture than just stimulus response/valuation/categorization.

sophiston I Finally Understand Closures

Why are there so many of these "I finally understand [cloures | pointers | misc CS concept]" posts? I mean these are pretty fundamental concepts that any first year CS student should be able to grasp pretty quickly.

sophiston IBM's eight-core Power7 chip to clock in at 4.0GHz

Didn't they get the memo? You're supposed to add more cores now instead of clockspeed.

sophiston Why you should never be a startup girlfriend

Again, spoken like someone who hasn't lost someone. You may become progressively less likely to let any given person become that important to you over time, but losing someone truly important really doesn't get easier.

sophiston Why you should never be a startup girlfriend

Only people who haven't really lost someone say this kinda stuff. The pain of loss eclipses all the good parts of having loved by a large margin, in my experience.

sophiston The Shaggy God - Richard Stallman in Boston Magazine

He's taking credit for Linux now? wtf?

sophiston When I Thought I Was Smart

"i still think i'm smart, actually."

Not smart enough to use proper capitalization, it seems...

sophiston Algorithm to detect the photoshopped Iranian missile launch

Because the copied rocket actually came from another photo. The original analysis showing it copied from the adjacent rocket was wrong.

sophiston Ridiculous Small-Business Plan Encouraged By Friends

No. No no no no no no. Please no Onion on the Hacker News front page.

sophiston Free & Proprietary

Proprietary software is never better.

sophiston Spartan Programming

Geez. Please tell me these pun threads are not spreading here from reddit.

sophiston Richard Feynman on The Value of Science

Feynman in action: http://youtube.com/watch?v=HKTSaezB4p8

sophiston Kill Your Users Table

LOL

sophiston LinkedIn Architecture

It's really not that hard to just type "site:news.ycombinator.com <search terms>" into google. Just sayin...

sophiston Top ten essential Emacs tips

1) Use vim instead.

sophiston Flash on iPhone would be a huge revenue leak

I don't think non-hacker types even know what an interpreted language is.

That was actually my point. When someone doesn't know the technical meaning of a phrase, they generally assume the literal and broad meaning of it. The target audience for the original blog post presumably falls mainly into that category.

And just because something is not of particular interest to you doesn't make it anal nitpicking that "does nothing to further discussion."

sophiston Flash on iPhone would be a huge revenue leak

I don't think anyone is claiming that Java is an interpreted language. The claim is that "interpreted language" to most managerial, non-hacker PHB types means "a language that at some point during execution requires interpretation."

sophiston Flash on iPhone would be a huge revenue leak

The difference is that binaries contain instructions that map directly to hardware operations, whereas bytecode is interpreted by a binary. The interpretation is an intermediate step that doesn't take place when a program runs on bare metal.

edit: Of course, it would be possible to build a machine that actually executes JVM instructions directly. It would also be possible to build such a machine for JavaScript, but if someone asks you whether JavaScript is an "interpreted language," the answer would still be affirmative, even if there are cases where it's not true.