Hacker News Reader

baha_manon How to retire in 10 years

"There have been plenty of detailed studies carried out recently... that demonstrate how the life expectancy of a retiree drops the earlier they reitre."

The main finding of the study you link to seems to be that early retirement doesn't increase life expectancy, as some have previously assumed.

It did find that "employees who retired at 55 had a significantly increased mortality compared with those who retired at 65", but with the proviso that "poorer health status of some early retirees may play some part".

baha_manon Exceptions for control flow considered perfectly acceptable

"Debuggers will break on exceptions... Decent debuggers allow you to specify which exceptions you break on and which you don’t."

This drives me mad in Visual Studio, if you specify a set of exceptions to break on, then later decide you need to catch all exceptions, there's no easy way to go back to the first set.

I'm surprised this question and partial answer on Stack Overflow haven't got more votes:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5452480/how-to-save-and-m...

baha_manon Some Lesser Known Truths About Programming

Consider Dudley Code-right. He implements a feature which isn't well thought out, barely works from a user perspective , and has horrible usability. He comes up with a very elegant way to implement it. Boom, it's done, and nearly bug free. What bugs are found are quick to fix because the code is so clean and well put together.

Now compare this with J. Average Coder. He implements an excellent feature with high user impact in a typically half-assed way. The ratio of total end-user value to total invested dev-hours is through the roof in comparison. Not just a factor of 100 different, but factors of thousands different.

baha_manon It Takes 6 Days to Change 1 Line of Code

As mentioned above, Homer and Marge are servers rather than people.

baha_manon Speed Hashing

No, there isn't. From Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/a/4760170/):

"No. Why stop the user from copy-pasting their own password?

Whenever you're looking at a security protection like this, it's important to ask yourself: Exactly what kind of attacks are am I trying to protect against? In this case, even if you prevent copy-paste, the user can just retype it if they really want to, after all. And if you're worried about Evil Spyware, that stuff can just install a browser extension and look at the password in the DOM directly, or install a keylogger and capture it as it's being typed.

Indeed, this can even reduce security. Consider if the user's using a password management program that can either put the password into the clipboard, or display it for retyping. If you prevent paste, that means the user must display the password on screen for any shoulder surfers to see."

baha_manon Why Facebook is never safe

"A relative of mine was just denied residency at a prestigious hospital when the admissions committee found out through Facebook that she has children..."

Would you care to elaborate on that?

baha_manon Request for Startups: Kill Hollywood.

This just isn't true. In today's game it's very common for a player with the ball, in the area, to go down after the slightest contact from an opposing player, rather than stay on their feet and shoot.

baha_manon Facebook security hole allows viewing of private photos

"Of course, what PT Barnum said..."

Or possibly didn't say:

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

baha_manon Why Google Built Incognito Mode

That's the entire point. If incognito mode didn't exist, the user would clear their history and cookies instead, probably deleting cookies for 'clean' as well as 'dirty' sites.

baha_manon The Totally Unofficial Ruby coding style guide

No, you're talking about Hungarian notation, the guide is talking about standardised one-letter names for certain variables.

baha_manon 80% of People Quietly Despise Their Lives

"...you are going to get a pretty extreme bias when you let people self-report on this."

How else are you going to find out if someone's happy with their job?

baha_manon Standard work hours around the world

One of the footnotes reads 'Majority of unpaid work includes chores such as housework and shopping'. I would have expected it to mean 'extra unpaid time at the office'.

I can't tell, but it seems that they're basically adding up everyone's time spent on all the activities during a year (say) and dividing them by 365. This doesn't seem very useful, e.g. what does comparing time spent on childchare tell you if include the childless? Hours of paid work if you include the unemployed/part-time workers?

baha_manon If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?

"...programmers have respect on the level of assembly line workers... [in the] UK... your parents would much prefer you picked a respectable profession, like a doctor or a lawyer."

In the UK, sure, being a lawyer or doctor is much more prestigious than being a programmer. However, to equate programmers to (presumably unskilled) assembly-line workers is total nonsense.

baha_manon Why most people don't finish video games

The average age is rising not because young people today aren't becoming gamers, but because people who started gaming, say, 20 years ago, are still gaming.

Today's younger gamers probably make up a large percentage of the minority of all gamers who actually finish games.

baha_manon Ugly BBC Interview Touches on Deeper Issues in London Riots

"Initial reports I've read are that the boy he says was fatally shot by police was first non-fatally shot in the bicep, and then fatally shot in the chest."

Yes, also Mark Duggan was 29 - hardly "a boy".

Edit: Actually, while it's been confirmed that Mark Duggan was shot in the bicep and (fatally) in the chest, I don't think they've established the order in which the shots were fired.

baha_manon How Blackberry, not Twitter, fuelled the fire under London’s riots

Not sure if it adds much, but here's the Guardian's take on the same story:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/aug/08/london-riots-fac...

baha_manon Amazon rolls out a social network for Kindle

Yes, I don't want anyone talking in the cinema while I'm watching a film, but I may want to talk about it afterwards.

baha_manon Ask HN: A company that doesn't repect the "don't email me" flag ...

"Talk to your local data protection agency."

For the UK, this is the Information Commissioner's Office:

http://www.ico.gov.uk/complaints/privacy_and_electronic_comm...

baha_manon Getting Bin Laden: What happened that night in Abbottabad

"I don't think there is any religion/ideology that discourage things like "defending property and people".

Pacifism?

baha_manon Understanding the Git Workflow

"But then I would just resort to using something like quilt to manage patches onto of SVN, which is ridiculous."

This is exactly the way Mercurial patch queues work:

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/MqExtension

baha_manon Ask HN: What to do with an idle server?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2829619

"HN observers often assume we don't have a sense of humor around here. Actually, I've seen a number of funny comments upvoted, and have done so many times myself. It's closer to the truth to say that most people aren't nearly as funny as they think they are."

baha_manon Opinions of a middle-end programmer

"Pretty standard phrase, at least here in the UK."

No, it's definitely not.

baha_manon LulzSec's 'Topiary' arrested

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

"The rationale of the doctrine is that if ignorance were an excuse, a person charged with criminal offenses or a subject of a civil lawsuit would merely claim that he or she is unaware of the law in question to avoid liability, even though the person really does know what the law in question is. Thus, the law imputes knowledge of all laws to all persons within the jurisdiction no matter how transiently."

baha_manon As Criminal Laws Proliferate, More Are Ensnared

Ignorance of a law is normally not considered an excuse for breaking it:

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

baha_manon Life lessons learned in travelling the world for 8 years straight

"...you'll be hard pressed to find a Brit... who didn't take a Gap Year at some point."

Not true. Sure, it's common enough for young people to take a gap year before or after university, but not everyone does - I certainly didn't. Among those who don't go to university, taking a gap year would be the exception rather than the rule.

baha_manon FuzzyWuzzy: Fuzzy String Matching in Python

Not in the UK. I don't think the tongue-twister is well known here, but the phrase is used in the other sense in the TV show Dad's Army[1], which is still shown on the BBC. However, it's only used by one character[2], who's supposed to be 70 at the time World War II starts. So, I think it's a very outdated expression, and not likely to cause offence when used in the context of a programming library. I've certainly never heard the expression used other than in the TV show (where, as far as I know, it's still not censored - it's understood that the character's views were outdated even at the time the show was set).

The term is from a Kipling poem[3]:

"A derogatory term for a black person, especially one with fuzzy hair... From... one of Rudyard Kipling's... poems, written in 1918. The poem is in the voice of an unsophisticated British soldier and expresses admiration rather than contempt, although expressed in terms that sound patronizing today."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dads_Army

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance-Corporal_Jack_Jones

[3] http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/146100.html

baha_manon Learn C The Hard Way

' Is this a fair paraphrase? "Everyone here isn't attacking you, also, your draft sucks and shouldn't have been posted on HN."'

No, it's not. speckledjim is complaining that someone writing another book on C is not news, he doesn't say anything about the draft sucking.

baha_manon Electronic Arts Hates Strong Passwords

They're not the only site to silently truncate passwords, unfortunately.

(I hope you're joking about spending an hour trying to log in, though.)

baha_manon Ask HN: Is there a good tutorial on using Mercurial MG with TortoiseHG?

I assume you mean 'MQ' rather than 'MG'. I'd recommend learning to use patch queues via the command line first:

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/MqTutorial

Once you've done that, using the GUI should be straightforward.

baha_manon Git Tutorials for Beginners

http://hgbook.red-bean.com/