Hacker News Reader

dandrewson The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

Should you step in front of a Googlecar and get hurt, remember before you sue that it bristles with sensors and recording devices, and that it'll all be admissible in court.

dandrewson F.C.C., in ‘Net Neutrality’ Turnaround, Plans to Allow Fast Lane

Legislating "net neutrality" is a crude hack. The real problem is telco hegemony in the ISP space, as pointed out in John Gilmore's 2010 essay at http://www.nnsquad.org/archives/nnsquad/msg04177.html

dandrewson Name for OpenSSL fork released

"LibreSSL". Oh dear lord, that'll irritate RMS.

dandrewson Programmers' Proverbs (I'd love some input)

Not really programmer related, but I find these truthy:

- (Flight instructor's mantra): Fly the plane.

- When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

- Measure twice, cut once.

- (Paraphrasing Senator Moynihan): Show me the data. You're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.

dandrewson Ts’o and Linus And The Impotent Rage Against systemd

Yes, it is rabid and paranoid, and the repeated "fanboy" references are rather childish. But the article did bring up important points about RedHat's consistent embrace-and-extend history, which is well worth thinking about.

So I won't be flagging this one.

dandrewson Why doesn't GCC optimize a*a*a*a*a*a to (a*a*a)*(a*a*a)? (2013)

Oh, there must be a Common Lisp predicate that addresses this. prettymuchequalsp?

More seriously, I remember APL\360 SETFUZZ from long before many of you whippersnappers were born, which told the system to disregard so-many bits in an 'equals' evaluation.

FP implementations are generally evil, and errors cascade in irritating fashion. 50% of a numerical analysis class I took once was dedicated to error estimation. Stick to rationals if you can - it'll save your hairline.

dandrewson Ask HN: Cons of open sourcing MH370 investigation data?

(I do not think open source means what you think it means.)

Some of the data may be products of military signal gathering, capabilities of which those agencies would be loathe to disclose.

dandrewson How CMU Increased the Proportion of Women in Computer Science (2013)

See also: "How Harvey Mudd College Increased Its Percentage of Women in CS", a ten-minute interview with Harvey Mudd's President, Dr. Maria Klawe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ssh6ZcOorw

dandrewson The Europa mission is real and could very well happen

Bolden is certainly not the man for the job. See:

[1] http://www.examiner.com/article/nasa-s-bolden-no-american-le...

[2] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/story/2012...

dandrewson Ask HN: Difference between selling benefits vs featuers

O Bog, how I despise semantically null product briefs that promise to "synergistically increase your profit potential" or "apply market-leading holistic techniques to help build world-class infrastructures" or whatever.

Please, please, just tell me: What does your product do?

dandrewson Y Combinator Female Founders Conference LiveStream

Careful with that. You saw what happened to Larry Summers, right?

Seriously, I take your point about the differences between men and women. I saw the news tidbit a few weeks ago about the study on toddlers and the toys they prefer. I'm willing to treat those studies objectively.

Yet in the case I cited, fewer than three percent of attendees at a technical conference were women. "Predispositions to excel" or not, that's a statistic too big to ignore, and there's something else going on.

dandrewson Y Combinator Female Founders Conference LiveStream

staticelf, most of us here want that "true equality" that you refer to. But the unassailable fact of the matter is that we don't have it today.

Look around you: assuming you're in IT, unless you work in a truly remarkable place men considerably outnumber women. We (and I mean the egalitarian "we") have to do something about that.

I'd welcome your suggestion. But "start treating everybody as equals" is a goal, and not very prescriptive. How do we get from point A to point B?

(I upvoted you because your discourse is reasoned and polite.)

dandrewson Y Combinator Female Founders Conference LiveStream

Problem is, Crake, we're doing something wrong. Three years I went to Conj, and the first year there were -zero- women attendees out of 300. Second year it was -three- attendees out of 300. Third year it was eight or nine. I don't know what Lynn and company managed to attract last year.

The people attending Conj are bright, well-spoken, polite. I didn't meet a jerk in three years, a crowd I was proud to be seen with. But WHERE WERE THE WOMEN? What is going on here?

We must do something. I don't know what. I'll agree with you that exclusionary events are counterproductive, but I can't see the harm in recognizing successful women who can show us how it's done.

dandrewson A rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia

Sorry to disagree, but the movie is kind of meh.

Read Marty Caidin's book instead. It's hard to put down, and contains a nice section concerning Jim Pruett's finishing school that makes you want to become a pilot yourself.

dandrewson Consumer Reports Calls Tesla Model S The Best Car Of 2014

Swap demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZU0wnpyhF8

dandrewson Nokia announces the X and X+, its first Android phones

Parent was talking about all-Nokia product.

dandrewson Lisp: More is less

You paint "Clojure people" - I'm one - with a pretty broad brush. If one of us has said something you disagree with, then please cite it along with your rebuttal.

It is unlikely that you have an informed opinion of "Clojure people" on the basis of a few posts that give you heartburn.

dandrewson Lisp: More is less

Please name a language you use so that whenever you and I disagree I'll be able to cite the "Blub people".

dandrewson Computer-driven cars will convulse the automotive industry

Unless you paid extra for the level-2 protection package. Then the network has to select a level-1 vehicle to go over the edge.

dandrewson Jolla

The Maemo-MeeGo transition didn't simply replace technical innards; it completely disrupted the Maemo user community, which relationship was negligently bungled by Nokia management. (Although it may also have been due to Intel's influence via the Moblin contingent.) Weep for maemo.org, which once upon a time was the best friend Nokia ever had.

dandrewson Are We Alone in the Universe?

No, sorry - it's an original thought, half baked and poorly researched. Yudkowski's essays, written early in his career, introduced me to the potential of the technological singularity. I've intermittently contemplated what it means while I wait for it to get here.

Kurzweil makes an effective and well reasoned case that it is indeed coming, but his fantastic description of life after uploading is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers was more prescient IMO:

Kauffman: Love, desire, ambition, faith - without them, life's so simple, believe me.

Bennell: I don't want any part of it.

Kauffman: You're forgetting something, Miles.

Bennell: What's that?

Kauffman: You have no choice.

dandrewson Why do I hardly ever see an Apple employee on the internet?

I've noticed this too, and can only imagine that Apple clamps down hard. People I admired before they joined Apple (such as David Betz, Jordan Hubbard and Doug Field) became practically invisible, as if they'd fallen into a black hole.

I suppose they're well cared for, but I also suppose that it can be lonely in there.

dandrewson Are We Alone in the Universe?

"...they might be looking too"

I've postulated this once or twice on HN before: they're there, but they're not looking for us. Civilizations either self-destruct or they reach technological singularity. At that point, why explore the universe at the unbearable crawl of speed C, only to catalog endless permutations of the same old molecules, nothing to learn that you couldn't derive from first principles.

They spend their resources looking in the opposite direction: not outward, but inward. Down there, past ten or 11 dimensions of superstring theory, far beyond today's dimly seen fundament, beneath all those layers of turtles... that's the real frontier. Smaller, not bigger.

I think that alien civilizations just roll up into a ball and disappear from view, exploring the universe within.

dandrewson Idiomatic Clojure with LightTable

You're new to Lisp and JVM? (Perhaps new even to Emacs?) The activation energy required to get going in Clojure can be a bit daunting. Cool tool that it may be, I think that kibit should wait until you can drive around with some confidence. Premature optimization and all that, y'know.

dandrewson Ask HN: Burning idea for a story you've always wanted written?

Been done: see Carl Sagan's Contact

dandrewson Ask HN: Burning idea for a story you've always wanted written?

See also: The Man from Earth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAarR4tVEHU

dandrewson My employees reviewed me, and I kind of suck

Would to Bog I had karma points enough to downvote your dismissive comment. Really, couldn't you even read all the way through the article title? You know, where it says "... and I kind of suck"?

OP describes immersing himself in the details of a construction project, yielding to the temptations of total control. Micromanaging that project (atop the demands of family life) was a tremendous time-sink, and he lost focus on the Day Job - leading his company. He became detached, and his management style more autocratic and less consensus-driven.

He should have, he says, delegated or hired out much of the construction project work. Shepherding the company culture is a more important use of his time.

I found his introspective candor refreshing; not everyone is self-assured enough to admit a mistake.

dandrewson Ask HN: If you were CTO of a new start-up, what would your stack be?

Anything Cognitect - just because I've never met a Relevancer I didn't like.

dandrewson I emailed the CEO of T-Mobile and he killed my contract

Yep. Back in the PCs Limited days I wrote Michael Dell an appreciative letter for some out-of-warranty customer service I'd received. Got a nice acknowledgement letter back from a VP. That little exchange indirectly earned Dell a lot of business from my employer in later years when we dumped HP and were casting about for a new desktop provider.