Hacker News Reader

ilitiriton Mealworms can eat and biodegrade styrofoam

Imagine living in a world where one day you wake up to find half your car eaten by pests...

ilitiriton The yogic claim of voluntary control over the heart beat (1973)

Reminds me of the story of Prahlad Jani.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prahlad_Jani

ilitiriton Microsoft has developed its own Linux: in-house software-defined networking OS

Microsoft's foray - I don't necessarily mean that in a negative way - into OS technologies doesn't surprise me any more.

I remember an MS Rep telling us one day:

> Our CEO believes that consumption is the new currency.

The context in which he used it seemed to imply that Nadella believes that the way forward for Microsoft is to not so much compete with existing products, but to give people new and better ways to consume existing ones, and of course to consume these existing products themselves. So it really doesn't surprise me that they've built their own Linux for Azure Stack, especially with guys like Cumulus Networks in the market.

ilitiriton Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

Worth reading, especially the stuff that is linked:

http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-archi...

ilitiriton An Explanation of Cricket (2009)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBRAzmaq5x0

Gotta love a game that has fielding positions "Silly Point", "Deep Square Leg", "Cow Corner" and "Short Third Man".

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/Cricketf...

Cricket is to me one of those sports that I hated the idea of playing and watching, but I always enjoyed it when I did.

ilitiriton Fragments of World's Oldest Koran May Predate Muhammad

While I would actually like this to be true (just to see how it would affect Muslim beliefs), I don't think it is. But what surprises me more than anything else is how a legitimate historian can come to the conclusion that this finding changes in any way what we know already, especially since the same person admits that the radiocarbon dating only applies to the ink and not the parchment.

The quotes from Tom Small are unremarkable considering his previous publications and statements about Islam.

ilitiriton Virtual particles aren't particles (2011)

Something that I found rather interesting but still don't quite understand is the effect of the Uncertainty Principle in a vacuum. Apparently the Uncertainty Principle affects not only particles, but fields as well (which in my mind is possibly due to the mass/energy equivalence?). This manifests as disturbances, which is what causes these virtual particles to "appear" in a vacuum.

ilitiriton Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?

I feel exactly the same way, and yet I don't feel the same way. I've been programming since I was 12. Professionally for about 16 years. I'm 37.

Life is bigger than your job or your immediate interests. Take a break. Travel. Challenge yourself. Break out of the circle that you don't like and find something else, even if it's just for a short while. That's what I usually do. At the very least you'll find something else to rant about, and maybe eventually realize that things could be much worse.

ilitiriton PostgREST – REST API from any PostgreSQL database

I find it strange when people adhere to these extremely dogmatic ideas about stored procedures. They appear to be either on one end of the scale or the other, ie. they either put all their logic in to Stored Procedures, or refuse to use them at all.

Of course, the reality is that people who use them reasonably do exist and are probably in the majority. You just rarely hear them talk about it because I suspect that they hold the same views about Stored Procedures, Constraints and any other DBMS feature as they do with any other software development tool ie. Use the right one for the job.

ilitiriton What part of speech is “the”? (2006)

I don't think there's much you can say about them at high school level. All we were taught was that "the" is the definite article and that "a" is the indefinite article.

ilitiriton The Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Human and Animal Health

I haven't had breakfast since about 2007. Well, of course there are days where I do have it when I'm staying over at a hotel, or I'm at an early work function. But I don't make breakfast for myself at home. My first meal is between 12h30 and 13h30. I don't feel any worse (or better) than when I used to eat breakfast in the past, but it's been so long that I really can't tell. I suppose this can be considered a type of fasting because of the length of time between lunch and supper the previous night.

I've never really understood the idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day because I've never suffered from any ailments because not eating breakfast. Or maybe I have and I just don't know it? But then I could apply that same logic to times when I got inexplicably ill or just was not performing at my peak and I did have breakfast. My point is that I don't notice any significant changes in my health and or behaviour.

Of course I don't advise anyone doing this (or NOT doing - check with your physician first), but I still firmly believe that there is a lot of about diet and fitness that has to do with the physiology of the individual.

(BTW, if anyone else thought the linked article sounded familiar it might be because you've read it already. It was published 1 year ago)

ilitiriton Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variable_theory

ilitiriton Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

I'm not really qualified to talk on a technical level about the matter, but besides the distaste some people have for Aether Theories, there are other reasons some scientists don't like PWT, especially as it's demonstrated by the behaviour of oil droplets.

The physical, conceptual differences between any quantities describing droplets on one side and the wave function on the other side are clear. The former are observable – you may actually measure what the shape of the droplet looks like; you can't measure the wave function by any apparatus, at least not in a single repetition of the experiment. The former has an objective interpretation; the latter has a probabilistic interpretation, and so on. The wave function just encodes all the probability distributions for actual observables – but the wave function isn't and can't be one of them.

http://motls.blogspot.com/2014/07/droplets-and-pilot-waves-v...

ilitiriton How American Fans Pirated Japanese Cartoons into Careers

I feel the same about most Japanese games with dual audio as well, except Metal Gear Solid.

ilitiriton Toyotas Unintended Acceleration and the Big Bowl of “Spaghetti” Code (2013)

Software that can modify any aspects of a vehicle's handling should be subjected to a higher level of testing and scrutiny than things like airbags and safety belts. A faulty cruise-control component is demonstrably more dangerous than a faulty safety belt.

ilitiriton WCF is Open Source

Read the first sentence:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms731082%28v=vs.110...

ilitiriton The Problem with the FizzBuzz Problem

The people who are replying and saying these problems are not the same because of the file size are are seeing the same type of illusion of complexity described in the submission. You count the number of lines you that begin with the word ERROR. That's it. At this scale, the tools you use are, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant.

Saying that the files might not fit into standard numeric types is like writing a custom BigNum implementation when I ask you to write a program that adds two numbers because I might give you value that doesn't fit into an int. It's of course fine to raise it as a potential issue, which would also show you know the practical implications. But what about if I ask you to write FizzBuzz? Are you going to give me the simple answer, or write something needlessly complex because I might test your program with a value like -3x10^78?

Perhaps I should have been clearer that the interns were fresh out of college, or part of a placement program, and that the rest of the interview wasn't technically challenging for anyone with real-world programming experience.

In my case, nearly everyone who struggled with the second question told me they thought there was some significance behind the file size and that made them avoid the obvious answer.

ilitiriton The Problem with the FizzBuzz Problem

I did an experiment while interviewing interns once. For half the group, I posed this problem:

> Given a log file, with each line prefixed with either WARN, INFO, ERROR or DEBUG, explain briefly how you would determine the number of errors logged assuming that each line corresponds to a single event and vice versa.

For the other half, I posed the same question, but I said the log file was 50MB big. Most people didn't know how to solve the second problem even though given the scales involved the solution is essentially the same.

(By the way, the question wasn't used as part of the criteria for the job)

ilitiriton FIFA Officials Arrested on Corruption Charges; Face Extradition to U.S

> some actual interest in football.

The entire region is crazy about football. 5 of the 20 richest clubs in Europe are sponsored by a Gulf company.

http://gulfnews.com/sport/football/more-football/uae-tops-eu...

ilitiriton MAME and the New Emulation Reality

I did some Mame hacking the other day. Basically, I added code that would let me automatically reload a state and record my inputs at the touch of a button on my fight stick. I wanted this functionality so that I could test various glitches in games and then replay and record the event.

While I'm not the biggest fan of Mame's source code (it's still got a lot of macros from it's C heritage), it is fairly simple to understand, and you can gain a lot of insight into how the hardware worked back in those days. I hope this project lives on for a very long time.

ilitiriton Go in Go

Is there anyway to navigate that presentation using only the mouse? If not, why not?

ilitiriton WCF is Open Source

I agree with the gist, but I'm curious as to why you would use WCF when there were simpler existing solutions (eg. Web Services)? If you simplified WCF to decoration via attributes, what do you gain over ASP.net Web Services?

ilitiriton WCF is Open Source

> It means an over engineered solution to a simple problem

This is exactly my point. SOA in practice is not a simple problem, and it's the reason WCF exists so of course it's going to be complex. The whole idea of SOA means that you're inherently stuck with the problem of communicating with different different systems that talk different languages, by trying to coerce them into communicating via a standard format, which for all intents and purposes was rarely "standard". And of course these things have to be done in a secure fashion, with logging and auditing every step of the way, and with the ability to change configuration properties by editing a text file instead of having to via a Change Control Board and the entire QA process.

My feeling is that people who were using WCF for "simple" problems were probably using the wrong tool, even though in most cases it would have probably worked fine.

ilitiriton WCF is Open Source

> Wasn't there web services before WCF to deal with SOAP?

Yes, you used Web Services to deal with SOAP messages. But SOAP was never the problem. WS-* was.

> These variety of specifications are the basic web services framework established by first-generation standards represented by WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI.[1] Specifications may complement, overlap, and compete with each other. Web service specifications are occasionally referred to collectively as "WS-", though there is not a single managed set of specifications that this consistently refers to, nor a recognized owning body across them all.

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

I also don't understand why people think that "enterprisey" is inherently a bad thing? It was designed to be used in the enterprise. This is evident in it's relationship to SOA, which is basically its raison d'etre. When you build apps in enterprise environments you have to put with all kinds of crap to appease auditors and to adhere to various acts and governance frameworks and protocols so that you can maintain your position on whatever Stock Exchange etc. That's just the nature of the beast.

ilitiriton WCF is Open Source

Sadly, even SOAP UI can't solve all your problems. WS-* is just so complex that it's rare to find two sufficiently compatible implementations.

For example, on one WCF service I capture the message as it arrives and then write to disk. If I replay this message through SOAP UI, it fails unless I modify some of the headers.

WS-* just sucks in general.

ilitiriton WCF is Open Source

I've used it with all sorts of backends and clients. And you're right - in most cases it wasn't WCF's fault. Which is why I'm curious about why OP blames WCF.

ilitiriton WCF is Open Source

> On XML iirc too

It serializes correctly.

For JSON you need an appropriate converter but as I said I would not use WCF with JSON.

ilitiriton WCF is Open Source

> overdesigned XML backend written in Java nine years ago that uses an alternate canonicalization for digitally-signed XML and requires a slightly-deviant form of SOAP authentication

I think you've found your problem.

I'm pretty sure everyone has had to deal with alien legacy systems at some point in their lives. It just goes with the territory. I have yet to come across a technology to that can handle all exceptions and edge cases.

ilitiriton WCF is Open Source

It's worth remembering that the technologies you mentioned weren't around when WCF was created.

As far as I can tell, Microsoft doesn't really push WCF any more simply because the use-cases are fewer and/or irrelevant in the current Web Service landscape.

I also get the feeling that many people commenting here didn't need to work with WS-* and associated technologies at the time WCF didn't exist. After its release it really was a choice between the lesser of two evils. But at the time, WCF was the mischievous kid who didn't do his homework, and everything else was the direct spawn of Satan.

A reminder of what WCF is (Wikipedia):

> a runtime and a set of APIs in the .NET Framework for building connected, service-oriented applications

> WCF is a tool often used to implement and deploy a service-oriented architecture (SOA)

For people who were around during the SOA dark ages, I won't be surprised if reading that sent shivers down your spine. Thankfully SOA, as it was evangelized, is pretty much dead. For everything else, these days better data-interchange technologies exist.

ilitiriton WCF is Open Source

> Have enumerations somewhere? WCF will encode them as integers.

Can you give an example of this? I have never had this problem.

> Have or need a date/time value in a format that isn't what WCF generates or expects

In my experience this is a data-interchange problem that will always exist. It is not unique to WCF.

I do agree that if you are using REST/Json then you should avoid WCF.