News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

kenmazy

Re:31,140 Pennies Used for a Kitchen Floor on Thursday August 30, 2012 @06:06PM (#4457124)
epsilon = some very small number used in mathematical proofs, usually approaching zero.

OP is saying that this is too similar to cat pictures. I think that it is worlds better than cat pictures, but still not relevant to the HN community.

Re:Sebastian Thrun and Google's Driverless Car (video) on Thursday August 30, 2012 @05:07PM (#4456816)
"The top two were robots, and number 3 were all the humans"
Re:Hopefully more controversial programming opinions on Thursday August 30, 2012 @11:24AM (#4455044)
Not sure how you can love automatic programming but dismiss biology. Humans are an operating system that is not only time dependent, but spatial and gradient dependent self mutating automatic programming with asynchronous message passing that is also time/spatial/gradient dependent.

Oh yea, and inserting breakpoints and print statements not only take months, but also change your code in a case-by-case fashion.

It's like reverse engineering for masochists.

Re:87 year old Illinois doctor charges just $5 a visit on Monday August 20, 2012 @07:24PM (#4410325)
Nowhere in the video was it every implied that the doctor handed out antibiotics like candy. I wouldn't be surprised if this doctor actually wrote less antibiotic prescriptions than his younger peers.
Re:Commit Driven Development on Wednesday August 15, 2012 @12:10PM (#4386651)
Usually I write a little code, commit what it is supposed to do, then fixup all the little edge cases and bugs that come naturally. But what's important is that first commit is sets up a little problem with a clear goal, and then everything afterwards works toward that goal.

Two extremely useful aliases:

  [alias]

  fi = !sh -c 'git commit -m \"fixup! $(git log -1 --format='\\''%s'\\'' $@)\"' -    
                                                                                                             
  ri = rebase --interactive --autosquash
First alias allows me to create a commit prefixed with fixup! very easily. So workflow looks like this:

  2536aw3 implementing feature foo
  sfd93ja fixup! implementing feature foo
  ok4jzvd fixup! implementing feature foo
  k4okvxx fixup! implementing feature foo
  2okoswa fixup! implementing feature foo
  zxvorm3 fixup! implementing feature foo
  ko2koaa fixup! implementing feature foo
And then I rebase when git log --graph --pretty goes off the screen.
Re:The Myth of the Super Programmer on Sunday August 12, 2012 @11:47PM (#4374521)
From my experience with super programmers:

The super programmer converts complex ideas into code coherent to the normal programmer.

The super programmer makes difficult decisions where the normal programmer sees only one option.

Re:American TV Neglected the Saddest Story in the Olympics on Sunday August 05, 2012 @01:08PM (#4341938)
I was trying to find a clear description of what happened, with supporting evidence at the right times, and it was surprisingly hard (many arm-chair fencers).

This is the best I could find: http://shinalamandtheinfinitesadness.blogspot.com/2012/08/sh...

Re:Rare Are GC Talks on Saturday August 04, 2012 @01:43PM (#4339080)
Another great GC discussion for LuaJit: http://wiki.luajit.org/New-Garbage-Collector
Re:Lazy people innovate on Friday June 29, 2012 @04:18PM (#4178846)
That's funny, I interpreted what he said a bit differently for "impatience" and "hubris". To me, impatience and hubris go hand in hand for a good hacker.

Impatience: Why is this code taking so long?

Hubris: I could write code that is way faster/better than this!

This is a bit of a tangent, but do you have any sources for consumer-grade desktop parts being lower quality than enterprise-grade? I'd like to read an in-depth hardware analysis that describes circuit board design, capacitor sourcing, etc.

I'm really curious to see how different equivalently priced ASUS and supermicro boards differ.

Re:The UTF-8-Everywhere Manifesto on Monday April 30, 2012 @12:03AM (#3907973)
Hanja is widely used in modern Korea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja

Last I checked Squeeze had a fairly straightforward Xen 4.0 package. I did have trouble with dropped packets, but I was doing some pretty complex stuff and it was already fixed upstream.

How exactly are you trying to setup networking? Bridged, routed, NAT on dom0 vs domU?

These two pages might help you, though both are slightly out of date:

http://www.pc-freak.net/blog/how-to-configure-and-enable-xen...

http://wiki.kartbuilding.net/index.php/Xen_Networking#Two-wa... (more out of date, but ideas are correct)

EDIT: ZFSonlinux is worth looking into as it's becoming fairly mature and provides the perfect storage for xen instances.

Re:OmniOS: Illumos-based OS from OmniTI on Sunday April 15, 2012 @04:34AM (#3843148)
Regarding zfs: the zfs on linux project (http://zfsonlinux.org/) is actually fairly mature and has decent performance ( though there are still some outstanding issues with using zvols as xen filesystems, and also if using a xen paravirt kernel ).
Re:Paul Graham has lost the plot on Wednesday March 21, 2012 @03:32PM (#3736145)
Can you prove they would be?

How many closed-source, for profit software projects were rescued after the supporting company went under? (I am intentionally conflating closed-source and for profit as the majority of financed projects are closed source).

What you have to consider here is the rate of progress, as well as the length of development time. Open source projects have essentially infinite development time, whereas closed-source, for profit projects have a finite development time (whenever the company decides further development isn't worth it anymore)+. However, open source projects tend to have a slower rate of progress versus financed projects.

After 6 months or 1 year, sure, the financed project will probably be ahead. How about the 5 year mark? 10 year? It becomes much less clear which project will have accumulated more man-hours.

+very rarely, closed-source projects are released as open source (e.g. Doom 3), but I think we can all agree that that is the exception to the norm

Re:The death of Firefox on Tuesday March 20, 2012 @10:10AM (#3729284)
I also like chrome's omnibox, but I dislike their support for rss feeds as a bookmark (live rss) as well as their video adblock (doesn't work).

For firefox, I use the https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/ addon, it works quite well for me.

Now if only I could find a way to get firefox tabs into the title bar...

the phrasing is vague, but all it is describing is tunneling http/etc through ssh. Ostensibly, you have some remote server whose internet connection is more "secure" than your home connection.

I for one do not own any servers in Switzerland...

Re:The Linux Setup, Noah Lorang, 37signals on Tuesday March 06, 2012 @05:53PM (#3673317)
I highly, highly recommend http://hardforum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=40 for build your own pc advice. There are some very knowledgeable and helpful people that frequent that forum (in my experience, more technical than tomshardware and reddit).

If by chance you don't find a thread by someone with similar needs and budget(seriously, thousands of these threads), then just start your own and it will be answered promptly.

Re:Netflix Loses Toy Story 3, Tron and 1,000 More Movies on Thursday March 01, 2012 @11:44PM (#3655410)
Important correction: Netflix's HD tops out at 5 Mb/s, not 5 MB/s.

Bluray max bitrate is 54 Mb/s, but I've generally seen transcoding to 20-30 Mb/s have nearly the same quality.

Re:Dear Github, please fix the Watch-Button on Monday February 27, 2012 @10:48PM (#3641803)
git rebase -i can handle your last request (interactively combine/remove/move history).

In fact, git can also handle your second wish by having simply creating a "sync" branch pointing to that extra commit, then when you switch to between your laptop and desktop, pull the sync branch, check out the commit (apply it to your working directory), then switch back to the master branch and continue working (the commit never appears in the master branch).

Git rebase would handle the "forced commit on merge with no meaningful conflicts".

hope I don't sound like too much of a fanboy :)

Re:Magnificent looking HTML5 game - "Project Blaze Zero" on Thursday January 26, 2012 @02:14AM (#3513205)
Pressing Esc brought me back to the menu.