Hacker News Reader

chanchoon China’s Family Planning Goes Awry

I think it's more likely that the imbalance between the sexes will correct itself through any of the myriad feedback mechanisms before it has a significant effect on Chinese evolution.

For example, parental preference could shift back to girls (or at least even out) since couples will probably be expected to support all four parents in their old age, and eligible bachelorettes will become a valuable commodity. Having a boy becomes an evolutionary gamble: a daughter will surely bring grandchildren but a son may die childless.

chanchoon Are real numbers uncountable?

This is a goldmine.

"Assuming any real number can be represented using base 10 (this is of course false, since it is not possible to represent all real numbers in any given radix system)" So that bit in parens pretty much refutes his whole post.

And the tree: "One can traverse it sequentially..." Go depth-first or in-order and you'll never get off the left spine. Go breadth-first and you'll never get past the first level because the root has (countably) infinitely many children. This is actually a very intuitive argument for why the reals (oops I mean decimals) are not countable.

And the "refutation" of Cantor's argument of the reals is fun too. I've never read the original argument, but I always figured that you're supposed to jump over the entries i/j for which i and j are not relatively prime. They're easy enough to spot. I can't be 100% sure my logic is sound, but I'm sure this guy's isn't.

chanchoon Noobcomments View Allows Flagging Spam Comments

I'm going to upvote them all to make them feel welcome.

chanchoon A common bug in published code

Google code search needs a "submit bug report to all" function.

chanchoon Technical debt (or, mortgages in Haskell)

    instance Num (MONEY -> Currency) where ...

Any hack with type "Money -> Currency" fits firmly in the "horrific" column.

chanchoon ACM censors linking

I haven't been to siggraph, but for $1,175 ( http://www.siggraph.org/s2010/for_attendees/registration ) there's surely a potential for a contract between you and the ACM via your conference registration.

Also, copyright holders don't need to enter into a contract to assert their rights. You don't enter into a contract when you watch TV but you still don't get the right copy and distribute shows (or sporting events) that you watch.

chanchoon ACM censors linking

Right but the ACM is the ultimate source of the data. They own the conference, the paper selection processes and hence the list of papers. It's hard to argue that this list was compiled without _ever_ looking at the ACM's list. It's a grey area for sure, and you could argue that if you go to the conference and simply observe the presenters and their paper titles, or even just ask the authors "Did you get a siggraph paper in? What was the title?" then that is your data, but by the same logic I can go to the World Series and live-blog a play-by-play account of the game, which would surely get me sued. (Maybe people do this I don't know I don't follow sports, but I know that the leagues claim copyright over accounts and descriptions, regardless of whether they actually have those rights.)

chanchoon ITunes update screws text. Official solution: remove all your third-party fonts

This is crap. 'Thou' is part of a whole class of pronouns (2nd person informal) that are completely absent from all modern speech and writing. 'Whom' is the objective form of 'who'. I/me, he/him, she/her, we/us, they/them, who/whom. It's not used very often in speech, but it's used every day in formal writing and thus very much alive. There is no disagreement among educated speakers of the language as to which usage is correct and which is incorrect, only disagreement as to which is acceptable in context. Celebrating it's death is celebrating ignorance.

chanchoon Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala released

I think you overestimate how closely "the masses" pay attention to fonts. (Unless you're talking about "the masses" of programmers and designers, which actually is still a healthy chunk of Ubuntu's potential market at this point.) Yeah ok the hinting isn't so great and Bitstream Vera Sans is a little too wide but it's not THAT bad.

chanchoon SICP in Clojure (In Progress)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation-passing_style

chanchoon Haskell logo fail

This logo was chosen by a vote of the community. Here are the other choices.

http://www.haskell.org/logos/poll.html

Multiple people came up with this same design independently, because its meaningful: a combination of a lambda and the bind operator, >>=, two of the most fundamental operators in Haskell.

Anyway this was months ago. And if you want to point a fail-finger, point it at the guy who chose >>= for the bind operator. "LOL yer operater looks like the train logo!" (And I'm being facetious. That operator is awesome.)

chanchoon Ask HN: Wrist Pain

Which trackball? Logitech Marble Mouse works great for me because it puts my hand in a position that most resembles a hand-shake (relative to other mice and trackballs.) I noticed immediate benefits and thought "Hey trackballs are great!" but then I started using a Mac at work and the scrolling there is not so great so I bought a Kensington Expert Mouse for the fancy scroll ring. Just awful. Wrists flat on the desk, hands bent up toward the ceiling. Worse than a mouse. Not all trackballs are great.

chanchoon C++ Frequently Questioned Answers

Just one language? Of course not that's selling yourself short. Surely, with great effort and many years, you can master many languages, and use them masterfully in concert like many do with C and Python. And if you can do that then you can master the many faces of C++. Maybe you just don't need to.

chanchoon C++ Frequently Questioned Answers

So is this how "appeal to authority" works in language pissing contests? The "authority" is money? "I make money using this language so blah blah blah QED."

chanchoon C++ Frequently Questioned Answers

what use are generic and meta programming without a sane range of 'regular' programming capabilities?

C++ contains C. How can it not contain a sane range of 'regular' programming capabilities?

(Of course in this context, 'regular programming capabilities' does not refer to web apps so let's just avoid that whole argument and take for granted that C is a useful language.)

This is a great instance of two (maybe 3) arguments against C++ canceling each other out: On the one hand, C++ sucks because it's wed to C and inherits all it's legacy warts. Anyway, C is a better C++ because it's simpler. And yet, as you claim, C++ offer's no useful core of functionality on which layer all the generic templately goodness.

chanchoon C++ in Coders at Work

How, on a site like HN that champions pragmatic entrepreneurialism, can you possibly claim that the success of C++, a language that has been deployed probably more than any other except C, is controversial? It's a matter of fact. C++ won the early OO race. Maybe Java and C# and whatever have since eclipsed it, but it was still a smashing success by all objective measures, and still is by some of those measures. Yeah it's ugly, but end users don't care.

chanchoon Self-optimizing data structures: using types to make lists faster

C++1x and Haskell'' are going to differ only in syntax.

chanchoon I Don't Code in my Free Time

Fame and Infamy have subtle differences.

chanchoon New instrument scales musical heights

I think it's just an optimized combination of pre-existing control methods. Keys with aftertouch, breath control and some touch surfaces. Evolutionary, not revolutionary.

what we needed was a way to control the gamut of sounds that can be produced by a computer in a unified way

That's a bit like asking for a way to control the gamut of images that can be produced on a canvas in a unified way. There are 1445068800 possible 1-second-long CD quality recordings. Most sound like white noise. I think what they're going for is not to span the whole range of sounds, but the whole range of familiar music, plus-or-minus a little.

chanchoon New instrument scales musical heights

I didn't know Rob Hubbard scored the Bourne trilogy.

chanchoon Hulu Has A Desktop Client For Linux

US cable TV has never been viewable outside of North America+, and that you pay for. Why is it all of a sudden a problem that you can't watch your shows when you're traveling?

(+unless a provider in another country happens to carry the same shows.)

chanchoon First Pictures Of Single Window Gimp

But having to position them manually is just tedium. Let me choose which palettes to display and which side of the window to display them on, and then let the application take care of the rest. If I'm running at fullscreen then I don't want anything covering up the document/image/model. Otherwise, I only want to have to move/resize one window.

chanchoon In praise of the fast, reliable, cheap breakthrough known as "wires."

I took my wife and I FOREVER to find a motorized baby swing that didn't take a buttload of C or D batteries, just plugged into the wall. Wires are highly underrated.

OTOH, we just recently moved the computer to the TV's spot, bought a tuner card, a big ass monitor (set to a hilariously low resolution) and a wireless keyboard/mouse (combined, not separate.) It's a pretty sweet setup. Pause tv, check facebook, look for something on Netflix, check hulu. Highly recommended.

chanchoon One Small Leap for Open Source, One Giant Leap for Mankind

Were it not for prior art, I'm sure the design for a bridge could be patented. And then someone would invent a truss bridge, a covered bridge, an arch bridge, a cable stayed bridge, etc. each getting a patent because each improves on the state of the art. You can patent just about any physical implement. The reason "obvious" stuff (physical equivalents of OneClick) are not patentable is due to prior art dating back to the stone age. Now computers have opened up a land rush on pure mathematics, which used to not be patentable but now is through clever wording. IMO this needs to be resolved by legislation (whichever way you come down on the debate.) The existing patent framework is just not designed for it. So bringing it up before the supreme court is a good step forward.

chanchoon Dvorak Users Oppose Qwerty Layouts on Smart Phones

I have no doubt that Dvorak works better for you, but I wonder if it's not so much the layout that makes a difference, but rather learning to type all over again while paying close attention to your hands allowed you to break bad habits.

I took a few typing classes in school as a kid, but of course didn't pay attention. Like a lot of people I learned qwerty by osmosis, not through proper training, and so I accumulated all sorts of terrible habits: reaching across, shifting with the same hand, etc. I got to be really fast but this was just amplifying the damage. Right about the time things were getting really painful I picked up vim. For me at least, it wasn't so much that vim (or Dvorak or whatever) really makes all the difference, it's just that it forces a clean break with your old muscle memory. And because the pain is the reason you're willing to put in the effort to re-learn, you're damn sure to learn it properly this time. That's all it took for me. No pain since, still on a standard rectangular qwerty keyboard.

chanchoon Very fast, scalable mutable maps and hashes for Haskell

It sounds like you are describing linear types or uniqueness types, not Haskell's monad solution to mutable state. (Haskell supports neither linear nor uniqueness types.) The aerial view of Haskell mutable state is that every function that wants to "really" mutate state secretly takes a "world" parameter and returns a new "world" parameter. Mutable variables are just references to some named "thing" in this world value. It appears to mutate because the thing to which it refers also appears to mutate because the world is being swapped out from underneath it. There is of course only one world value (RAM) and this is really and truly being mutated. Only at the most abstract level can this be considered immutable, but there are still theoretical advantages to operating at this level, e.g., there is an implementation of the IO monad (IOSpec I think?) that truly does keep a copy of the world around, which is useful for testing and such.

The main difference is that Haskell maintains uniqueness of only one secret paramter, the world, while linear or uniqueness types can do it on a per-value basis (which sounds to me like what you described.) The bad news is that this is much less interesting from a theoretical point of view---within the monad side effects are still unconstrained---but from a practical point of view it means imperative programming in haskell is pretty accessible, funny vocabulary notwithstanding.

chanchoon Netflix's tail massage

The longer a movie's been out, the more likely it is that you've already seen it. The global production rate of quality movies is much less than 3 per week. Once you've exhausted* the catalogue then you're either stuck waiting for new releases or you resign to watching movies you're not that interested in. It's laudable that Netflix is trying to hip people to obscure movies that they'll hopefully like (and make money at it, because obscure movies are cheap) but more often than not the movie just sucks. There's a lot of crap out there. Wasting 2 hours on a shit movie burns bad enough that I don't gamble my time on it anymore.

(* I know this sounds ridiculous but some people just don't enjoy movies made before they were born. Most movies are not timeless, and the timeless ones you're likely to have already seen.)

chanchoon Netflix's tail massage

> To accommodate peak demand, Netflix would have to do what Blockbuster does: order a metric truckload of Wolverine, then either let it suck up shelf space or dispose of it somehow after the spike was over

Or just burn more copies. The cost of a disc is probably less than the postage. But they'd have to get a license for that, which leads back to same reason: studios charge more for popular movies. Renting good movies on Netflix is hard for the same reason it's hard on iTunes, which has no inventory problem.

chanchoon Efficient Editing With vim

OS X:

Put the following in ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBindings.dict

{ "^w" = "deleteWordBackward:"; }

GTK:

echo 'gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"' >>~/.gtkrc-2.0

gconftool -t string --set /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme Emacs

Windows:

... uh ...

chanchoon Why F#?

Parenthesis omission.