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grn

1 karma · joined September 22, 2026

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grn··on Only a few countries are teaching children how to think
I live in Poland, went to school here, and definitely cannot confirm the claims made in the article. Half of my education happened in the reform school system that the article mentions and almost everyone agrees that it's much worse that the previous one.

High school in Poland used to be a preparation for further education at university. It ends with a nation-wide exam called matura. The reform greatly reduced the number of other types of schools. It has two effects. First, it's much harder to find a skilled worker because there are much less workers trained. Second, the general level of education at high schools dropped significantly. It had to drop because otherwise many of the new pupils wouldn't pass the matura. Notions of a logarithm, exponential, prime decomposition has become foreign to pupils. No one has heard about a derivative or an integral for more than a decade.

Of course all the above is a generalisation. There are some great schools with teachers who really want to teach their subjects instead of just formally completing stages of the government-mandated education program. Unfortunately they are in minority. I'm really concerned about quality of education that my children will get in this country. Home schooling is an option though an expensive one.

grn··on Wireshark is switching to Qt
Is there a solution better than implementing OS-specific GUI to provide native look and feel? I was thinking about that and came to the conclusion that the best thing we can do is to separate the business logic from the GUI. We can then equip the application with a CLI, a GTK GUI, a Qt GUI, etc.
grn··on Going Beyond Vulnerability Rewards
Note that their maximum reward is 3133.7 USD. You can also the program rules at https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/patch-rewards/.
grn··on If Java Is Dying, It Sure Looks Awfully Healthy
I haven't programmed in Java but I sometimes read Java source code. I must admit that I like the language which to me is a better C++. However I don't like the way it is used i.e. tooling, libraries and programs. I don't like AbstractProxySingletonFactories, XML configuration files, long method names and lots of other things. That being said I believe that a change in the programming culture surrounding Java may lead to more pleasant programming experience.
grn··on Frequency-shaped background noise generators
I use http://simplynoise.com to put my daughter to sleep. It's much easier when the noise is playing. I also use http://rainymood.com to isolate myself from the environment when I'm working.
grn··on How Rsync Works
You can take a look at librsync. It might be useful for you.
grn··on Hello Haskell, Goodbye Lisp (2009)
I'm not a Lisp nor Haskell programmer though I plan to learn both. The article was quite interesting especially the part about macros. How much does lazy evaluation decrease the need for macros?
grn··on Poll: Freelancers/Consultants – What's your yearly income?
How do you structure your work with several clients? Do you work for a few weeks for one client, then a few more for another, etc?
grn··on When An Accidental Feature Becomes Your Entire Business
When I saw the title I thought that it'll be about Flickr. Do you know other businesses that underwent such transformation?
grn··on Reversing Bits in C
Could you recommend a good reading (a book preferably) for learning about CPU architecture. I'm aware of Intel Software Developer's Manual. What other resources are worth reading?
grn··on Should We Abolish User Access to rm? (2011)
I made such a wrapper for myself [1] after accidentally removing lots of photographs. It uses LD_PRELOAD trickery to achieve its goal. It's in a very early stage but I'm working on it.

[1] https://github.com/grn/careless

grn··on GorillaScript
Looks very interesting! The features that caught my attention are:

    * immutable values
    * cascades
    * try/catch/else/finally
    * promises
    * async
    * optional typing
    * curreid functions
    * generics
grn··on The Rise and Fall and Rise of Java [video]
I found this http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/musings/JavaLang.html. Looks comprehensive.
grn··on The Rise and Fall and Rise of Java [video]
I added the language because I am not interested in the libraries. I'm interested in the syntax and semantics.
grn··on Replacing All The Things with Unite.vim
Why do you think so?
grn··on The Rise and Fall and Rise of Java [video]
Thanks! Everything looks very familiar. Is that's all to know about Java (the language)?
grn··on The Rise and Fall and Rise of Java [video]
Is there something like "Learn Java in 15 minutes" for programmers knowledgeable in other languages? I'd like to see idioms, keywords, basic data structures described in a condensed form.
grn··on The Long Shadow Of The Valley Reaches Berlin
What are the implications of this for a developer considering moving to Berlin? Is it easy to find a company with a long-term vision with goals more ambitious than the fastest possible exit?
grn··on You commit three felonies a day
That link says that Christianity is 40% larger than Islam, so it is significantly larger.
grn··on New Zealand amateur astronomer captures amazing deep field image of Centaurus A
I'm absolutely speechless! Very impressing job. Take a look at http://www.rolfolsenastrophotography.com/Astrophotography/Ce... prepared by Rolf Olsen (the author of the post) and Mike Sidonio.
grn··on President Obama’s Dragnet
A little generalisation of her reasoning may lead to a conclusion that we should collect data on everyone since birth in case he becomes a criminal. It's scary.
grn··on Wyoming teen builds nuclear reactor in dad's garage
Interestingly the student who built the reactor is named Conrad Farnsworth. Any connection between him and Philo Farnsworth?
grn··on Mozilla can produce near-native performance on the Web
I wonder how the Internet would have looked like if it had developed the way that Alan Kay proposed (i.e. a browser as a mini-operating system). It's quite possible that we'd have much better performance (among other things) from the start.
grn··on Functors, applicatives, and monads in pictures
The line

    data Maybe a = Nothing | Just a
introduces a new data type. Here a denotes another type which serves as a parameter (an example of a parametrized data type is a list; a list of integers, a list of strings, etc.). In this case we define a data type Maybe a that may contain a value of type a. On the right hand side we have type constructors. They describe different ways that can be used to construct a value of the type we're defening. Here we have two constructors: Nothing which takes no arguments and Just which takes one argument of type a.

Assume that a is the type String. Then Nothing is a value of type Maybe String but it's an empty box that contains no value. On the other hand Just "Hello, World!" is a box with the specified string inside.

Disclaimer: I'm not a Haskell expert. Feel free to correct me.

grn··on Poll: HN Linux users, what desktop environmemt do you use?
I use xmonad at home and I'm expefimenting with i3 at work.
grn··on A proposal for an always-releasable Debian
Currently contrib is used for packages that have compile-time or runtime dependencies on packages outside of the distribution (e.g. with dependencies in non-free).
grn··on A proposal for an always-releasable Debian
The Debian FAQ recommends using unstable because it can take some time for bug fixes to go into testing. I'm on stable right now but I'd been using unstable for about 6 months and it worked great.
grn··on Show HN: vim-multiple-cursors - True Sublime Text style multiple selection
I must admit that I see little value in it given great capabilities that Vim already has. The three example edits can be made using regular expressions and macros.
grn··on Collaborative chat done right
HipChat supports XMPP which is a big advantage.
grn··on Why does this png display differently in Chrome/Firefox than in Safari/IE?
My explanation is as follows: the original image uses a checkerboard pattern. When you make a thumbnail it removes some rows and columns to make the image smaller. When you remove all even rows and columns of a checkerboard the fields that are left are of the same color. Similarly when you remove odd rows and columns.

In this case black and white fields of a checkerboard correspond to pear and apple pixels, so you are left with one of the images.

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