HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

tamas

143 karma · joined June 8, 2009

submissionscomments
tamas··on Demoscene TV
Also: http://capped.tv/ for higher resolution.
tamas··on Ask HN: How much did you spend on your startup before you got ramen profitable?
That approach didn't really work out in the dotcom era. Of course, in some cases it would make greater turnout, but it is an expensive experiment.
tamas··on The Tao of Programming
I saw it earlier on reddit, and when I noticed it on hn, I was about to flag it for being yet another trash story copied from reddit, but then I saw that it already got 15 votes. I must be too young for this, but I did't find it funny, insightful or engaging, thus I did't feel any inclination to read more than a couple pages.
tamas··on Ask HN: Guido van Rossum's comment about go and scratch
I don't see it as cryptic. He just said "it's a toy". Also: oranges are way better than apples
tamas··on Ask HN: How do you explain closures?
The idea is really nice, but I'm not sure it would work on the OP's Joe, who probably wouldn't even care about the hypothetical language and would regard the whole concept hypothetical, only for those who have way too much free time. (With WoW on the table, you don't have that luxury.)

I would take the route of first order functions -> anonymous functions -> closures, but I think it is really a lost cause for the typical 9-5 programmers.

tamas··on Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum Mechanics
Roger Penrose is not merely saying that quantum mechanics is wrong. Instead it would be more fair to say that he views quantum mechanics as an incomplete theory, and one that should be continually challenged.

That's how every scientific theory should be approached, as that's what sets them apart from dogmas.

tamas··on Goldman Sachs loses money on just one trading day in Q3
Wow, apparently I expressed my point poorly, as you guys seem to pick up that I'm advertising how awesome I am and how I kick GS' ass on the markets.

What I wanted to say is that it's hard to find an index that went down during Q3 so those hundreds of traders could actually manage to not lose money but only one day, so that post and the comments really seem to be... subjective and biased.

As your note of my "strategy" being a mistake, I'm actually fine with my results and I'll keep going long, thank you.

tamas··on Goldman Sachs loses money on just one trading day in Q3
I haven't lost any money on investments in 3 years, and I'm nowhere near being an educated economist. With a diversified portfolio, I could always find an equity to sell above the buying price when I needed money, and this way I could ride out the bear markets without realizing losses.

Of course I'm nowhere near Goldman Sachs in volume (about 6 trades a month on average), just telling that it is actually possible to achieve a "perfect score".

I know Goldman Sachs is not really popular right now among the people, and I have absolutely no intention to defend them, but this seems a bit like a witch hunt.

tamas··on FatELF is no more. Linux developer community owned Ryan Gordon.
It's not as bad as it sounds, basically great many of the http://git.kernel.org/ repos are actual forks of the kernel, regularly pulling changes from vanilla, resolving the occasional conflicts and maintaining/developing their own patches.
tamas··on Xmonad 0.9 released The light, reliable, extensible tiling window manager
Gnome and KDE has their own window managers, namely Metacity and KWin. These can be replaced by other window managers, like Xmonad, and you can still use the Gnome/KDE infrastructure and utilities just as nicely.
tamas··on Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
I have always had the habit of quickly editing the query if the top 5 results aren't what I was looking for, up to the point where I don't even really think about it, just adding some more keywords or sprinking a couple pluses, minuses or quotes. So I can't really tell if it has deteriorated in the past years.

However, I do think it could be possible that the pagerank algorithm does not scales good enough for the growth of Web pages, and especially with the "SEOs" out there always trying to come up with new ways to game the system.

tamas··on Google Voice messages appear in search results
Also: If you publish something on the Internet, it might appear on the Internet.
tamas··on Mystery Google: You get what the person before you searched for.
Great demonstration of why not to use Adsense or other context-based ads on a site with a search bar and no context whatsoever.
tamas··on Cray - A Clojure Ray Tracer
Right, although there are options to combine the two.

Shader language can be used to write raytracers running entirely on the GPU, rendering the output to merely two textured triangles streched over the screen.

However as we are talking about Clojure, not shader languages, an alternative way would be offloading some of the weight lifting to OpenGL, for example by calculating visibility using the videocard's z-buffers or creating shadow maps by rendering the scene from the lights' viewpoint into shadow buffers and using the results in the raytracer.

tamas··on Structure and randomness in the prime numbers
That's why he wrote "mostly being odd" and that's why he called it obvious.
tamas··on FreeBSD 8.0 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 Benchmarks
Or you use barrier=0 mount option for your ext4.
tamas··on Debunking the Duct Tape Programmer
Did he just list his "Eagle Scout" badge under "News"?
tamas··on Bank Sends Email to Wrong Gmail User, Sues Google For His Identity
I had this fun idea of registering an email address with an username being a common noun. Although I found it strange that the address was still available, but I didn't care too much about it, I was happy to have the account. (You know, new inbox smell).

And then emails started to arrive to the address. Of course, lots of them were spam-spam-spam-spam. But there were also some personal letters. For a while I thought it was some mistake, and replied nicely to them pointing it out, and tried to inquire about what could be the reason behind the confusion, but never really figured out.

The mails kept coming, and I realized that they weren't even addressed to the same person. Up to now I have at least 30 alteregos, giving out my email address to their friends, relatives, and using it in an attempt to register on web sites. Most of them seem to be female, so I get many mails trying to hit on "me" after that talk on im or seeing my profile on some website, etc. Also pictures of nieces, invitations to bbqs, and questions about my iron and if I can bring it to "the club" next Tuesday.

I just hope I won't get sued one day.

tamas··on Seth Godin Tries Out Brandjacking
Who is this guy anyways? I saw lots of submits to his blogs on HN and other sites, but they seemed short, shallow and uninteresting, so I figured they were posted because Seth Godin is some kind of authority, not because they were so good posts. But I never figured out when and how he became such an authority.
tamas··on How not to teach people to debug
I had a course that employed the same system. The course wasn't about debuging or real world applications, it was about algorithms. The task was to implement an algorithm correctly. If you did not implement the algorithm correctly, the test cases would fail. If you did not use the correct data structure, the test would time out. That's what it's all about. No specific clues were given so you can't do workarounds taylored to the test cases, or god forbid, hardcode the expected results.

You could do as much testing on your machine as you'd like, with your debugger of choice. And when you are sure you understood the algorithm and implemented it correctly, you can submit.

tamas··on What Sort of Exercise Can Make You Smarter?
It is hard to get a job in mainland Europe without knowing English (as a developer). While the "another eu language" varies from country to country, the demand for English is constant.
tamas··on Humans evolving 100 times faster than historical levels.
Blue eyes and blonde/red hair are recessive traits, while brown eyes and hair are dominant. You having blue eyes means both of the gene pairs that control eye color have the recessive blue, while your wifes brown eyes can be caused by having a set of blue and a set of brown genes, and as brown is the dominant one, it is what was actually expressed in here eye color. The fact that your children have blue eyes means she does have genes for blue eyes, and they are inherited into your children as well as your blue genes, hence their blue eyes. The same goes for blonde/red vs brown hair.

Either that, or consult with your milkman/gardener.

tamas··on Popular Search Engines in the 90’s: Then and Now
I used AltaVista back then and I clearly remember how much I hated it for being mostly useless. I was into data compression and wanted to find as much resources as possible, so I browsed through hundreds of pages of search results mostly containing gas pumps to pick up a couple of data compression articles. Google redeemed me.
tamas··on Is C++ still needed?
If by being modeled you are asking whether objects are used in C++ as in Java/C#, then I would say yes, maybe even more so. Of course in C++ there is a possibility to use it as a "C with some more stuff" language, and unfortunately it is used as such regularly. But well designed C++ code involves object usage quite similar to Java/C#. Also in C++, RAII is used for managing transient resources, and this probably introduce extra objects which in Java would not be created.

For example: Creating a temporary file and after some work deleting it would be done using try & finally sections in idiomatic Java, but in C++ an object would be used where the constructor contains the file creation and the destructor contains the deletion. This way the file lifetime is tied strictly to the object lifetime, which would be destroyed automatically when the code block is left.

However, the fact that object allocation on the heap is slow is mitigated by having the ability to create objects on the stack, which is probably even faster than Java or C#. And they are also managed automatically, so stack objects are always preferred if they are suitable.

While I think it is an apple-to-apple comparison, it is a microbenchmark, and as such probably irrelevant in most of the real-world cases.

tamas··on Is C++ still needed?
Actually, object creation on the heap can be quite slower in C++ than in Java, at least if you are not using a custom allocator. The standard allocator in C++(using malloc) is SLOW.
tamas··on Haiku OS first alpha scheduled for September 6th
The title lies: September 9th
tamas··on Gravity to Save 90% Energy When Using a Fridge
Am I the only one who sees a usability problem with this? With freezers this layout is acceptable, as you don't browse around for stuff many times a day, just dump them in the box and forget about it till next spring.

Even if it has shelves, just by thinking about how one gets the jar of jelly out from the back of lowest shelf makes my back hurt.

tamas··on Ask HN: What do you think makes a good teacher?
1) The teacher needs a thorough understanding of the topic being taught. I regularly use the reverse of this as a litmus while mastering a topic: I did not understand it deeply enough if I can't explain it to a complete layman so they can understand it.

2) Having a full duplex interaction. Talking AT people will make them only bored, but not smart. Watch for reactions, ask questions to force the student to explore the topic being discussed. If they can't answer, try to find out where their train of thought stalled, and elaborate. Of course this doesn't work very well in larger groups of students.

Usually, neither circumstances (smart teacher, small group of students) are given in compulsory education.

tamas··on Cloning Vi Using Haskell
Also nice Vim-ish editor in Haskell: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yi
tamas··on Radiohead Says No More Albums
Interestingly, they announced this after releasing an album on the Internet. Nine Inch Nails also announced their farewell tour after doing online release[s] (1 regular album, and a 4 CD instrumental, collaborative set). Maybe it's a sign of really getting tired of the "music business" when a well established band starts doing online releases?
Page 1 of 2Next →