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stonemetalon There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast

No, just because breakfast is a compound word doesn't mean it must exactly match the two words it is composed of. Spearmint isn't mint leaves tied to a spear, Carhop doesn't involve jumping in any way, and understand doesn't involve standing anywhere let alone under anything.

stonemetalon Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

While it is better than git at working with large files, the large file extension doesn't solve the problem 100%.

stonemetalon Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source

It claims to be able to handle binary files well which would be a big deal to game development. They have mostly passed on git and mercurial since they can't handle game assets.

stonemetalon Why Is No One Writing Language Runtimes?

Is this supposed to be like the joke "Nobody drives in New York the streets are too crowded."? If no one is writing them how can you rattle a half dozen runtimes that have achieved various levels of success. If anything you might ask why there are so many rather than getting behind one opensource runtime and pushing it farther rather than starting over all the time.

stonemetalon A Basic Income Should Be the Next Big Thing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

Not sure where you got your numbers from. Wikipedia suggest that it was not even half that.

>The results showed an impact on labor markets, with working hours dropping one percent for men, three percent for married women, and five percent for unmarried women.

stonemetalon Poll: Apply HN Runoff – Which two startups should YCF fund?

How is it different than the infection resistant surfaces we already have? Say microban which is found on most shopping carts as an example.

stonemetalon After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight

potatoes and corn are plants, both of which cause enough of an insulin spike to be worrisome. Just eat plants isn't a good enough answer.

stonemetalon Ask HN: How do you decide what to learn next?

I use "This is interesting" to give it about three or four days. After the "this is interesting" stage, things that fall into the "this might be useful" bucket get a couple of weeks. Then it is either getting used, or it is getting put on the back burner indefinitely.

stonemetalon VW 'Dieselgate' software developed at Audi in 1999: report

> And there are many other fields which could probably be entirely operated by machines when the technology is sufficiently advanced.

As far as I can tell the technology is sufficiently advanced, just not sufficiently applied. Considering all the tech. involved in autonomous driving there are plenty of jobs that could be automated away with it not just ones involving vehicle use.

stonemetalon Jupyter Notebook 4.2 Released

Their landing page of their site isn't too bad the first thing you see is The Jupyter Notebook is a web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, machine learning and much more.

Though I am not sure why their blog doesn't link to the landing page of the site.

stonemetalon RoboVM is winding down

Then I guess you didn't click on the documentation link at the top of the roboVM page.

Why RoboVM? We love mobile. We love the Java ecosystem. If you feel like we do, you will love RoboVM:

Create truly native mobile apps for iOS and Android. Use libraries, tools and languages from the vast Java ecosystem. Share code between platforms.

It seems to be an alternative to xamarin focused on Java or at least the JVM.

stonemetalon The camel doesn't have two humps: Programming “aptitude test” canned

So you are incapable of writing any program you haven't seen before or have seen but didn't decide is important enough to memorize?

How can you expect to be a professional software developer if you can't get some specs, then develop a solution?

stonemetalon The camel doesn't have two humps: Programming “aptitude test” canned

> it's taken for granted that not everyone can be a doctor, dentist, or lawyer.

I am pretty sure everyone could be a lawyer if they wanted to be. The couple of lawyers I have talked to about it say that it is all about hard work not smarts or any special skill.

stonemetalon Understanding the ginormous Philippines data breach

Images can be hashed(and hashed in such a way that minor changes can still lead to the same hash), so images of fingerprints should be hashable.

stonemetalon Ask HN: What programming languages produce code most/least prone to bugs?

>Languages don't create bug

No but they allow certain classes of bugs to be written.

>people create bugs and there will always be bugs.

To true, but I take that to a completely different place. Some languages require super human amounts effort to avoid bugs that are easily machine checkable, or the language could offer tools that don't even make such situations possible. Picking a safer language allows you to spend some of your bug avoidance effort in a more profitable way.

stonemetalon Judge Who Authorized Police Search of Privacy Activists Wasn't Told About Tor

An ip address is not good enough to locate someone. If they have evidence beyond an ip address sure raid the house, but if they have no identity evidence beyond an ip address then they need to understand they have no identifying evidence.

Per this article yesterday, MaxMind(a geolocation ip service) lists a farm in Kansas (selected because it is roughly the midpoint of the US) as it's unknown location as a result it is given as the address for something like 600 million ip addresses. The farm's owner has been harassed by several law enforcement agencies and countless vigilantes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11466849

stonemetalon The sugar conspiracy: sugar—not fat—is the greatest danger to our health

If there is evidence I haven't seen any. Pretty much everything I have seen suggests that A) You should meet your macro needs which are slightly different for everyone, B) after that don't over eat, but what you eat doesn't really matter.

From a weight loss perspective low sugar diets are good for psychological reasons, not thermodynamic ones. Sugar tends to cause quick, but short lived fullness, where fat and protein take longer to kick in but once they do they are much longer lived.

stonemetalon Panama Papers Reveal Clinton’s Kremlin Connection

By itself it isn't that big a deal but considering the .5 million she was paid to give speeches to Russian investment firms, or the 2.35 million she received from a Uranium mining company that she helped sell to Russia. It is starting to be a pattern of behavior.

stonemetalon The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (2006)

I don't see any goal post moving.

He claimed :Normal people do not spend $35-40k on a car.

He further clarified that his definition of normal person to be one that doesn't tend to buy new cars, only used.

You point out that 18 million new cars are sold per year and that average new car price is over 30K a year. That completely misses the point that approx 60 million cars are sold in the US per year or around 1/3 of cars sold are new cars. The average price of a used car sold in the US is around $18,800. Therefore the average car sold is A) used B) cost less than $30K.

Number of Used cars sold: http://www.cnbc.com/2014/08/22/used-car-market-showing-no-si...

Average price of a Used car: http://www.edmunds.com/about/press/used-car-prices-increase-...

stonemetalon Advanced Linux Programming – book with free PDF (2001)

Buy a Mac, OS X is a certified UNIX.

stonemetalon Advanced Linux Programming – book with free PDF (2001)

Using the higher performance Linux specific interfaces like epoll isn't doing it wrong, it is getting the most out of your platform. Perhaps it is doing it wrong to use it directly instead of a library in application code, but someone still has to know enough to write the library.

stonemetalon I've Just Liberated My Modules

If the kik in question is kik.com then

>Are you a developer? Kik has open-sourced tools and libraries to help you create great web experiences that can be discovered and instantly shared by Kik's 240 million users.

Rather sounds like a valid use of the law, not necessarily nice but valid. They are in the same space, open source web development.

stonemetalon Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up for Sale in Robotics Retreat

Fishermen and environmentalists alike.

stonemetalon Making a Go program 70% faster by avoiding common mistakes

What can you say Go prefers fast compilation to smart compilation.

stonemetalon LivingSocial Is Laying Off More Than 50 Percent of Its Staff

Is this just hind sight talking, or was it obvious the idea didn't have legs at the time?

stonemetalon FBI Wants It to Be Impractical to Deploy Strong Encryption Without Key Escrow

I'll just leave this here: http://www.dailydot.com/crime/tor-harvard-bomb-suspect/

stonemetalon Ask HN: What is the difference between a closure and an object?

In theory they are the same thing, in practice they are not.

If you treat closures like objects, they are tedious, and missing lots of nice conveniences that OO languages provide for their objects.

If you treat Objects like closures then they are heavy weight, have too much formality, and have annoying limitations to work around.

stonemetalon How Google’s Web Crawler Bypasses Paywalls

Wouldn't it run afoul of the DMCA for making available a tool for circumvention?

stonemetalon The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism

>Since no one would argue that knowing an extra language is not useful,

Why would no one argue that? If I am a person from Kansas I am never going to run into anyone who doesn't speak English. Where is the usefulness in learning any other language?

stonemetalon Ask HN: Why don't more web projects start with a JVM stack?

I do front end web development for a place that uses java on the back end. The time between when I hit deploy to the time I can refresh and see new code in my browser is too long. Usually by the time it is ready I have gotten distracted and ended up on HN.

When I work on side projects that frustration is something I don't want to repeat. Java doesn't make the list of tools I consider. Maybe the other JVM languages have a better story in that regard. I just figured they reused Java's infrastructure and were equally handicapped.