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copperon How India's banks killed the future of commerce

This was instituted when I was still at IIT because some people just /stopped/ studying, quite literally. I suppose it was a simpler solution than offering counseling for what could (I suppose) be called 'net addiction'. Ahh, memories :)

copperon How India's banks killed the future of commerce

It usually is :) but cleartrip might just be right here to blame the banks. Asking for more secure authentication is a good idea, particularly in India where on more than one occasion, I've had to stop people from writing down my credit card number for "the record".

That transaction volumes decreased on the /first/ day 3-D secure (and now, the one-time password) was implemented is hardly surprising, but I think once customers get used to it it would have returned back to normal.

copperon Racket 5.1 Released

I played around (rather ineffectually) with David's Haskell code, back when the whole "Yacc is Dead" stuff was here, and I still tend to believe that Haskell results in less code when laziness is involved :)

That said, I think I really like define/fix

copperon Christopher Monsanto gives up trying to delete PL articles

For what it's worth, the stuff that passes for discussion on the AfD pages makes me wonder if something like the Scholarpedia model for articles is the better way of doing things.

copperon Python 3 Wall of Shame

I don't do webdev, so I fully agree with that :) FWIW, NumPy supports python 3 (for quite a few months now, IIRC), and I imagine that SciPy does too.

copperon Christopher Monsanto gives up trying to delete PL articles

The important thing would be restoring the articles. As far as I can see, that isn't happening (yet).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemerle

I might just be seeing a cached version, though.

edit: grr, I cannot reply to you, but yes, that was my point exactly: he could request a deletion review.

copperon Tar 1.24 ouchies

From the changelog for tar 1.25:

    Fix extraction of empty directories with the -C option in effect
    Fix extraction of device nodes

copperon Poll: How many (natural) languages are you fluent in?

> I speak 3 and read another 3

Doesn't that mean you can speak 6?

The Indian subcontinent usually gets complicated, as there are usually a /lot/ of local dialects that people speak, and some of them may arguably deserve to be separate languages - at least, the speakers usually think so :)

copperon How I Built a Startup High Frequency Trading Firm

> it works on the same principle as a the 'worm' in Office Space (geek reference) attempting to make very small amounts of money in mistakes, miscalculations and very short-time discrepancies in valuations of financial instrument.

Just to continue this discussion a bit further, how are these mistakes supposed to be corrected otherwise? :)

copperon Poll: Where do you work?

Heh, I used to work at one time for someone whose products were cordially detested in the semiconductor industry because they were considered (with some reason) to be bug-ridden ad-hoc implementations of things the semi industry thought they absolutely needed :)

copperon Show HN: EDW, quantitative analytics, machine learning.

Isn't that data available if you're willing to pay enough for it? For example: http://nseindia.com/content/research/res_histdata.htm

copperon Show HN: EDW, quantitative analytics, machine learning.

Since this article doesn't mention it clearly, the demo is really nice, and worth a look: http://edwardworthington.com/

copperon Study: College Students Not Learning Much

Thanks for the detailed reply. It's funny that you can't use a test to select people for a job, while you can use the same test to select people for college (though perhaps I'm extrapolating, since the wikipedia article only mentions that you can't use the test for internal transfers and promotions.)

copperon Website calculates how your life might be like in another country

http://www.ifitweremyhome.com/compare/IN/CA

I /think/ that the way likelihood of HIV/AIDS is calculated needs to take population into account in a better way. Fun comparison, though!

copperon Study: College Students Not Learning Much

Why isn't it legal, out of curiosity? I get to see quite a few CVs that include the rank the applicant got in the IIT-JEE exam (for most purposes, I find that to be a rather useless metric.)

copperon Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick

If it helps, he's the author of a rather nice series of science-fiction books.

copperon Baby Steps into Genetic Programming

Lee Spector has made a Forth(like) language, called PushGP, which, in my opinion, handles syntactical correctness in a nice way. There's even a JS implementation, which wasn't there the last time I checked.

http://hampshire.edu/lspector/push.html

copperon Thunderstorms create antimatter

Thanks (both you and InclinedPlane), I guess that makes sense.

I thought there were some theories that early-universe physics were very different from what they are now, though I'm not sure how that would help.

copperon Thunderstorms create antimatter

> the Universe should be 50% matter and 50% antimatter

Out of curiosity, where does this come from?

copperon Who killed the Intel microprocessor?

I thought they switched to TSMC for sub-45nm processes, because retooling (or building a new fab) is prohibitively expensive.

copperon Functional Geometry

Racket's 2htdp/image module is arguably more fully-featured implementation of the same thing (though it should be fairly simple to add colors to Frank's code)

copperon On Improving When Your Friends Aren’t

I assume from this - one of the earlier comments by lsc:

    Having poor friends is /incredibly useful/ - need help moving but don't want to reciprocate? call up your highschool buddy who works at home depot. He'll be happy to help you out for a few bucks.

Though to be fair, it depends on what both of them mean by friend.

copperon Follow-Up to "Haskell and the 'foul stench of cargo cult mathematics'"

Experience, in my experience :) is measured by how many serious mistakes you made, and then went on to fix.

As far as the authors posts are concerned, though, it seems weirdly appropriate to quote Erik Naggum: "If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations."

copperon Why (Some) Smart People Hate Programming

It's not a lack of libraries - there are probably too many libraries, and all of them subtly (or blatantly) incompatible and difficult to use together.

Clojure, though, is a nice option.

copperon Ask HN: What kind of eyewear do you use?

OP: this could be a vote, maybe?

I use glasses. Higher-n glass for them would be really nice, and light, but it's above my budget, and apparently too fragile for clumsy people. I don't like them, but given the alternative, there isn't really a choice :) I wear them almost all the time when I'm awake (anything between 14-20 hours a day), and my eyes usually don't get irritated from just wearing them. Sitting in front of badly configured monitors, though, is a different matter.

I'm scared of the initial starting pain with contacts, else I'd consider using them.

copperon XSS vulnerability found in Github

I have a very warped model of browser usage, which in practice has translated to using:

     * IE for two banks
     * firefox+adblock for gmail, github and chesscube
     * chrome for facebook 
     * opera for everything else, which includes HN.

Just looking back at that list makes it seem even more terrible than it actually is :(

copperon What's so cool about APL

If anyone wants to try out APL after reading that, NARS2000 is a pretty good free option: http://www.nars2000.org/

copperon Why You Need To Work For A Big Company

Remember, though: only about half of NASA's budget is spent on space exploration (I assume that mostly goes on STS/ISS, and that will probably change if/when they retire the shuttle.) They do a lot of other good science too.

None of that changes the fact that working with SpaceX is an awesome thing, but I very much doubt it'll make NASA obsolete anytime soon.

copperon Allegations of FBI crypto backdoors in OpenBSD IPSEC

The mail Theo forwards has a vague description of what has been done (not that I understand it, mind you):

"My NDA with the FBI has recently expired, and I wanted to make you aware of the fact that the FBI implemented a number of backdoors and side channel key leaking mechanisms into the OCF, for the express purpose of monitoring the site to site VPN encryption system implemented by EOUSA, the parent organization to the FBI."

copperon 10,000 ints in 1 page of memory (4KB)

If you're willing to accept false positives, then yes, you can.

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

I'm feeling a bit lazy to calculate the error rate right now.