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adeelkon The future is specific

> But its really wrong to say IDE's like Eclipse don't do one specific task well. Eclipse really makes Java programming very easy.

“Making Java programming easy” is not one specific task!

adeelkon Coda 2

Completely missed that, sorry.

adeelkon Coda 2

> AirPreview is genius and bringing subset editing functionality to the iPad in a meaningful way is great.

There’s no editing functionality, just a preview of the page.

adeelkon Chess World Championship 2012: A First Win

> The only way to escalate the ranks in chess is to become a living database.

This happens in any field with significant theory. A chess grandmaster isn’t any more of a “living database” than a mathematician, for example, who spends about twenty years learning theory (from elementary school to Ph.D.) before working on original research. And in chess, just as in mathematics, learning theory is not as simple as memorization.

> Once chess becomes "who is the better database" it stops being intellectually or practically useful as far as I am concerned.

A player who knows some theory will always have an advantage over an amateur, but when the difference in players’ knowledge of theory is negligible, as it is in the top levels, it is strategy and tactics that win games.

I do understand your frustration, as an amateur chess player myself. But telling yourself that you would be a better player if you just spent some time memorizing opening lines is just a cop-out. That won’t make you a better player, it will just put you on equal ground with your opponents.

Edit: heh, coincidentally today’s game speaks for itself.

adeelkon Postgresql vs mongodb

No, it doesn’t.

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Indexes#Indexes-Basics

adeelkon Postgresql vs mongodb

Why do you say that?

adeelkon React is a PHP port of NodeJs non-blocking I/O platform

> Php is the DSL for the web.

What does it mean to be a DSL for “the web”?

adeelkon React is a PHP port of NodeJs non-blocking I/O platform

I don’t think that was intended to be an attack on PHP.

adeelkon React is a PHP port of NodeJs non-blocking I/O platform

Simple deployment is the only advantage people usually cite of PHP, and this seems to eliminate that. So, why?

adeelkon Computers are for humans

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with learning to program.

Learning the basics of any skill can help you, but it’s up to an individual whether he wants to spend his time picking up plumbing, car repair, programming, etc., or just focus on moving further in whatever his own field is.

adeelkon Computers are for humans

There are a lot of things we depend on others for. Do you call the plumber when your home plumbing leaks?

adeelkon Computers are for humans

You’re mixing up programming with computer literacy.

adeelkon Computers are for humans

> There is no way to automate a process using a computer without using programming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automator_(software)

adeelkon Ask HN: Would you pay for an Ad-Free Facebook?

Why don’t you use adblock?

adeelkon Goodbye, MongoDB

I really don’t understand how they used it for 2-3 years without knowing this.

adeelkon Please don't learn to code

[...] you'd have to go far over the school level of maths to get such benefits.

Not at all. Even deriving the formula for the sum of the first n positive integers is something that requires problem solving skills while not requiring more than school-level maths.

Also, given that CS is a part of math, you can't avoid it if you want to learn some mental structures [...] by all means study math, but catching a bit of CS knowledge and programming skills at some point should be a natural consequence of it.

Huh? Physics is more a part of mathematics than computer science is. And I don’t understand what you mean by “mental structures”.

we actually DID invent a new way of thinking in the last 100 years

Could you explain what you mean by that?

Anyway, my point was that you can’t argue that everyone should learn programming just because it’s a way to learn problem solving.

adeelkon Please don't learn to code

[...] you should also be insisting we remove all of Math from our school curriculum, because who uses anything beyond basic algebra? Hell, who uses anything beyond basic arithmetic now that we have calculators that can do algebra and calculus for us?

Mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, chemists, economists, statisticians, engineers, meteorologists, actuaries, biologists, accountants, etc.

adeelkon Please don't learn to code

If tomorrow you want to learn to cook, how would you feel if a master chef told you "No, don't. You'll never be as good as me. If you're hungry, come to my restaurant instead".

I think people who want to learn to program are learning already. The right analogy would be teaching everyone cooking in elementary school as a required subject, together with reading, writing and mathematics.

adeelkon Please don't learn to code

Bottomline, programming teaches us a lot of important skills and mental constructs useful for problem-solving and understanding how the world works. And those skills are hard to get elsewhere.

I definitely support the notion that everyone should learn problem solving skills, but people can take different paths than programming: mathematics, natural sciences, and even chess, for example.

As Richard Rusczyk, founder of Art of Problem Solving, says, “We use math to teach problem solving because it is the most fundamental logical discipline. Not only is it the foundation upon which sciences are built, it is the clearest way to learn and understand how to develop a rigorous logical argument. [...] This is not to say that those who cannot do math cannot solve problems. There are many paths to strong problem solving skills. Mathematics is the shortest.” [1]

And there have been many studies on the relationship between chess and problem solving, including this one by Ferreira and Palhares [2].

[1] http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/Papers/ProblemS... [2] http://www.math.umt.edu/tmme/vol5no2and3/TMME_vol5nos2and3_a...

adeelkon I am Doing HTTP Wrong

I am not sure whether Ronacher realizes it, but this is exactly the motivation behind Pump [1], an HTTP abstraction that takes a different approach than WSGI. It was criticized a lot by HN [2] and by Ronacher himself [3] but I’m glad that he understands my point of view now.

[1] http://adeel.github.com/pump/manual.html [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2810373 [3] http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2011/7/27/the-pluggable-pipedream/

adeelkon Mathematicians Come Closer to Solving Goldbach's Weak Conjecture

The conjecture has been verified already for large enough n that it can be applied without a real proof; a proof won’t give any new “real world” applications. Like with Fermat’s last theorem, the real interest in a proof is in the ideas that would be developed along the way. (For example, on the way to proving FLT Wiles established the modularity theorem for a class of elliptic curves, and his work was extended to a proof of the full modularity theorem in 2001.)

adeelkon Mathematicians Come Closer to Solving Goldbach's Weak Conjecture

Don't get it. How can you celebrate someone as the "youngest ever International Math Olympiad gold medalist" while simultaneously denying the importance of genius in math?

It sounds like you are under the impression that success in mathematical olympiads is connected with success in mathematical research. It’s actually relatively rare for IMO winners to go on to become successful researchers, because the skills involved, while not completely disjoint, are not exactly the same either.

adeelkon Mathematicians Come Closer to Solving Goldbach's Weak Conjecture

Number theory is a good source of unsolved problems that don’t require much background to understand. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_ma...

adeelkon I only know PHP. How do I write a Web application in Python?

Working with encodings is indeed annoying in Python, but it’s not a “universal” problem.

adeelkon Show HN: Open-sourcing my CV template [Helvetica, XeTeX, TikZ & Biblatex]

It’s pretty common to have several papers on the same topic.

adeelkon Ziptastic: Isn't a zipcode enough?

I got 404 for my German code.

adeelkon Everyme (YC S11) Launches Mobile App That Aims To Get Social Circles Right

I don’t understand why people don’t just use email for this. A few months I set up a mailing list for our family at fiesta.cc (easy private mailing lists) and we’ve all been using it a lot.

adeelkon Overthinking

Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem ultimately also came down to counting doughnut holes in things which you wouldn't normally regard as doughnuts

No...

adeelkon Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

I also switched from Python to Clojure. After picking up the syntax (there is almost none) I spent a few weeks reading the source of Ring by Mark McGranaghan [1] and constantly referring to ClojureDocs [2]. (My goal was to port Ring to Python [3], but after I did I realized I now knew Clojure and could just use Ring.)

[1] Ring: https://github.com/mmcgrana/ring

[2] ClojureDocs: http://clojuredocs.org

[3] Pump: http://adeel.github.com/pump

adeelkon Codename: Svbtle by Dustin Curtis

In my system each note corresponds to an idea, which usually starts as just a sentence or two (e.g. “You don’t understand something until it’s obvious.”). In this note I collect links, quotes, and my own thoughts relating to that idea. At some point I may turn all this material into a draft.