Hacker News Reader

BruceForthon Chinese cows (GM) to produce human milk. To be sold in 3 years.

Godwinned in 1st comment.

(edit: apparently it wasn't actually the first comment)

BruceForthon Are there subsets of C that avoid compiler bugs?

I wonder if there are compilers that don't compile an empty file correctly.

BruceForthon Hate Java? You’re fighting the wrong battle.

Blub programmer telling why you should program in Blub.

BruceForthon Groupon is Effectively Insolvent

Maybe because they are?

BruceForthon Why Windows 8 Is Fundamentally Flawed as a Response to the iPad

> The ability to run Mac OS X apps on the iPad, with full access to the file system, peripherals, etc., would make the iPad worse, not better.

For iPad users, yes, but not for Windows users.

BruceForthon Exceptions are Bad

Gaaahh.... Just because C++ and Java do something incredibly stupid when it comes to exceptions, doesn't mean exceptions are bad. Just that C++ and Java suck.

(hint: exceptions without restarts are retarded)

BruceForthon Germany to be nuclear-free by 2022

> another german trait is that everyone believes that everyone is to be fooled easily.

Historically, they have a reason to believe so.

BruceForthon Linux 3.0-rc1 is here

So, when will Linus be released from mental institution? [0]

http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/3/2/247

BruceForthon These are things in PHP which make me sad

things about php that make me sad:

1. it exists

2. it's used

3. many of its users make more money than me

4. it has poisoned the market, clients have learned to expect and even demand php-braindeath

BruceForthon How do non-english speaking people code?

I would presume they use a keyboard.

On a more serious note, as a native Finnish-speaker, I've always written all of my code and comments in English. It's just so much simpler than any other alternative I can think of.

BruceForthon The Only Way to Get Important Things Done

From the second article:

> I lost seven pounds in the first week, mostly from going to the bathroom as all the accumulated dairy mucus was cleansed from my bowels (now I know why cows need four stomachs to properly digest this stuff)

WTF? Does he think cows eat dairy? Or did I parse that wrong?

BruceForthon The Only Way to Get Important Things Done

There are still 24 hours in a day, doesn't really matter all that much in which order you do stuff when they still take the same amount of time.

BruceForthon Erlang inventor: Why do we need modules and files?

Common Lisp can be compiled one function at a time, and functions belong to packages, which are pretty much key-value databases you can modify, where keys are strings (name of the function) and the values are the functions themselves. So if there is something wrong with some function, I just update the value in the "database" and all callers will call the newly defined function from now on. Nothing magical really. This workflow is supported by the CL IDEs such as SLIME.

BruceForthon Erlang inventor: Why do we need modules and files?

> The more I think about it the more I think program development should viewed as changing the state of a Key-Value database.

This is pretty much how I view my programming in Common Lisp.

BruceForthon Lisp Lacks Visual Cues

I think Python-style implicit kw-args are a mistake. It means that caller can depend on the name of your function parameters and you can't change them without breaking existing code, which may not be yours. Explicit kw-args, where the names of params are explicitly advertised as part of the interface of the function, are a fine idea OTOH, and should be in every language.