Hacker News Reader

"mustaches on Monday"

What about those of us who have a mustache every day?

Ridicule is often one's best defense against the ridiculous.

The poster needed to say that because there is no greater fear for the modern devotee of the religion Feminism than that of appearing 'sexist.' It's a bizarre word of recent origin, and one that their cult seems to use for any sort of recognition of the differences between the sexes.

tmanon Never trust a programmer who says he knows C++

Badly standardized? Not since the mid-90's. And the days of cross-compiler pain went away almost completely when the last big holdout of the pre-standard days, Microsoft, finally released their 2003 C++ compiler.

Your next point, that C++ is just C "with OO" strikes me as deeply ignorant. OO is an important feature, but 95% of the language innovation of the last 20 years has been in templates.

Compilation errors are a pain in C++. It's something that takes months for a smart programmer to figure out. Debugging C++ is harder than debugging C, yes. It's a more complex beast.

Reading your post I get the impression of someone who has read a lot more about C++ than working with C++. Try interacting with any modern C++ code-base (something written in the last 10 years), avoiding the template meta-programming code-bases which are really only of use for library-writers not library-users.

tmanon India at the forefront of a new arms race?

Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe the Air Force just wants to convince Congress to replace the F-16, which got its clock cleaned (so they claim) by the Sukhoi in those exercises.

tmanon Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies

A recent book on this and various other topics related to recent human evolution is "The 10,000 Year Explosion" by Cochran and Harpending.

tmanon Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies

Uh, no, this subject is a tangent and we shouldn't really get into it here.

However, a couple of general statements: There are reams of genetic and psychometric data available. More than enough to develop pretty good idea when and where the most probable selection events for good brain genes occurred and how fast they spread. Your word 'premature' tells me something about your acquaintance with that data.

Also, there is one very simple rule: totally genetically isolated communities only have access to their own mutations. Their population is small, so the number of mutations is also small. Non-isolated communities get swept by every positive selection event that comes along.

tmanon Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies

The picture with the subtitle "Professor Abbi and Boa Sr became firm friends" is rather striking evidence of the diversity of human types present in that area of the world.

Some Google searching brings up an article with a descriptions of mitochondrial sequencing done on the Andamanese. Apparently they are of African pygmoid descent.

It's a rather good object lesson -- if you want to be a professor (the one on the right), don't let your ancestors get trapped in a genetic backwater for tens of thousands of years, missing out on all those good brain gene selection events.

EDIT: Not pygmoid after all. The pygmoid features are the product of convergent evolution. The evolutionary trend towards small stature seems to be due to resource competition from living on an island with barely enough space to support human habitation. It looks like they came through southern Asia.

tmanon Thirteen Million Wikipedia Paragraphs at your Fingertips

Does the same thing as Googlepedia does for Firefox. What impresses me more is the "Try search on" box on the right. It would be nice if that were customizable.

tmanon GNU Screen: an introduction and beginner's tutorial

It's worth grabbing the latest version of screen from git and installing it. That way you get vertical splits with ctrl-a ctrl-|. If you're running a new version of Ubuntu, you already have this.

Building screen isn't too hard. Run the autogen.sh script to generate the configure script.

tmanon Never short a country with $2 trillion in reserves?

Europe was heading to WWIII in 1947? I don't see it.

tmanon Is America going to hell?

Our diversity will save us.

(No, not really.)