masterzora

Background: I've done a touch of IDL astronomy programming with Marc Buie. I haven't touched IDL or astronomy for about a year, though I am still in contact with a couple astronomers.

In my (anecdotal) experience, it seems that a number of astronomers would actually love to move to Python but I've only seen one actually make an effort to make the move. The primary reason cited has been that some particular library modules they use haven't been ported yet. Glancing around the links from the article, it definitely seems that the porting has come a long way, but that's not the same thing as completeness.

Now, obviously the best solution would be if these astronomers each took it upon themselves to translate their own necessary tools and contribute back to the Python community, but that's pretty unrealistic, I think. I write Python for at least a good 8-10 hours/day and my IDL was clean, tight, and well-documented and I'm still terrified of the thought of translating my project.

Of course, the other question I have (and would _love_ an answer to) is how well Python holds up performance-wise to well-crafted IDL astronomy code. We were working with a data set large enough that, even on a cluster, each step of the process took between several days and a couple weeks. If Python could improve that, it would have been amazing, but if it would only hurt then Python would basically be useless for that project.

Oh, come on, keep the sensationalist headlines out of here. I know it's the headline on the linked page, but that doesn't change anything. Most of the article is about piracy, though there is a single quote saying that second-hand sales probably represents more in actual lost sales, which is both unsurprising and unexciting. There is also a brief paragraph outlining how EA (who, by the way, is not Lionhead) tries to convert the secondhand market, which is also nothing new.

And yet, the headline of the article seems to be attempting to imply that pre-owned sales are some great evil.

Sure, it is fair to note, and I think it's actually a pretty good point now that you've clarified it a bit. (I speak as someone who's currently using Python at work but Perl for my own things.)

However, it's a manner of how you present the comment. As you originally stated it, it pretty much sounded like "He's Doing It Wrong", which didn't add very much to the discussion. In my opinion, a much better way to go about it would have been something closer to "I think it's worth contextualising his comments. It is likely that the style in which was coding was more in line with earlier styles that are not used as often in 2011. While Perl is obviously still Perl, more recent styles do help alleviate some of his concerns."

Now, this clearly still isn't a perfect comment, but it, or something more like it, would serve both to clarify your position and to allow for discussion based on it, if people were up for such discussions.

But, again, I feel the need to reiterate that I was not one of the people who downvoted you, so I'm only guessing as to the most likely reason for the downvotes.

I was not one of the downvoters, but I was not surprised to see the downvotes. I can't figure out in what way that comment added to the discussion. "I am assuming he was Doing It Wrong" with no additional commentary on what this affects or the implications therein. Regardless of the truth of the comment, it just doesn't seem to be a very useful one.

Yeah, I didn't notice that on first read, but that definitely helps seal the deal for me. I'll probably set it up on my server tonight and at least look into hacking together that plugin.

That really depends on the use case, I guess. For me, the use case is that I've got a media server in my living room and, in addition to being hooked up to my TV, it also has a Samba share set up so that anyone in my apartment can watch/listen/look at/read/view anything anywhere in the apartment. In this case, it certainly would be possible to have every computer set up with a semantic desktop setup, but I'm still trying to keep my Eee minimal and visitors wouldn't necessarily be set up with the semantic desktop tools.

Maybe this implies ground for a semantic server, but I'm inclined to think that Samba (or your favourite mostly-transparent sharing protocol) on top of a tag-based system is actually a good and way to accomplish this particular use case.

This is actually something I've been wanting for a long, long time. Obviously I'm not planning on using this for / or anything system-related, but for my media archives &c it's perfect. Taking movies for example, I've found most people I know think an alphabetical approach is the way to go. This is useless, however, if I don't know what I want to watch. With the tags I can easily take tag in genres, directors, actors, etc and have my filesystem help me choose a film.

There is on major thing that I've considered would be an awesome addition to a system like this: automatic tagging from the metadata. It'd be awesome if my movies automatically got tagged by, say, resolution and length, so I wouldn't have to bother with such things.

GV was very helpful when my cell phone borked and out of service for a week since it let me redirect the phone number to my landline. That said, this is the only time this feature has ever been remotely useful to me, and now a replacement cell phone shows up quickly enough that I barely have time to switch the number over.

Given that the whole point of the article was how one person made everybody believe something just by asserting it true, I don't find it surprising that the HN title is trying to do the same.

If the UN Guidelines for Consumer Protection haven't brought down capitalism, why do you think having pre-written T&C that a company can opt to use would?

If anything, having easily understandable pre-written T&C in the style of similar license could only support capitalism: companies would opt to use them if they deemed it profitable, and consumers would be more able to make the informed decisions on which capitalism should thrive.

With the exception of the third point, I actually like all of these rules, kind of. However, I don't really like them as rules, per se, so much as guidelines. The thing of it is, if a sentence has been ended with a preposition, more often than not it can be rewritten in a clearer manner. Similarly, while passive voice is useful, to abundantly use it tends to make your writing dull and unclear. Similarly, split infinitives often obfuscate meaning, and sentences beginning with "but", "or", and", or "however" tend to be better served combined with the preceding sentence. Thus, as a general rule, I prefer for amateur writers to follow these guidelines as rules.

That being said, once you know how to write well enough and you understand when these guidelines make your writing better and when they make it worse, for the love of $deity, please break them all over the place.

I fail to see your point, at least in response to me. It would be a perfectly valid point to make to somebody claiming otherwise, but I am not. Is this comment misplaced, or am I just not following properly?

If there exists a sensical answer (i.e. not a variation on "because that's the way it is"), it's related to not receiving the advertising with the torrent. You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the show is the product. Unfortunately, just like in any other advertising-driven area, you are the product, and the show is a means to get your eyeballs on the advertising.

(Just to be clear and attempt to curb as many silly replies as possible: Just because it's true doesn't mean that I think it should be. Furthermore, your contrived circumstances wherein you turn the TV on and off at just the right moment to avoid seeing the ads is of no interest to me; besides being basically impossible to do properly, even most people doing other things during the commercials will be exposed to the advertising in some fashion.)

Clearly. Fortunately, nobody's arguing that it does give you such a right. The question at hand is "what harm does it do?", however, and the GP posits that the answer is "none, so why care?".

I never understood why Bogosort made the check so efficient; it seems so silly. Fortunately, somebody solved this problem and made bogobogosort: http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/bogobogosort.html

Important question: Have you signed anything, cashed any checks, or done anything else to actually make you beholden to the first? Even if you did, it doesn't mean that you're stuck, but it will make your situation a touch stickier.

That said, this is unlikely to significantly harm you, so don't worry about it too much. It would have done you much worse to miss out on the second opportunity!

While I'd clearly be wrong to state that there are no such people, I think it's important to note that even most people with the signs asking for money aren't doing so by choice. Once you're in a state where you really do need to beg for money for basic sustenance as such (which can happen surprisingly easily through no real fault of your own), it's really, really hard to get out, no matter how hard you try. And, in the meantime, while you are working to get out of it, you have to do something to live.

There is some (insufficient, at least in the US) help available from government programs and whatnot, but even non-participation in such things is not always necessarily by choice.

I've known a fair number of people who've worked their way out of poverty (my family among them), and I've known a larger number who have failed to do so by no real fault of their own. Your unkind generalisations are most definitely unwelcome.

I've found some truth to this in my own experience. I've actually given up on having cable/satellite/some other system where I can just turn on the TV and be inundated by crappy content. However, I still have a few shows a week I must watch in a timely fashion (via non-cable sources) and then a large DVD library of past seasons that I can use if I feel I need some sort of background activity.

My productivity is huge with this set up but I still get to watch my favourites.

Personally, I'd say you just apologise for misunderstanding their intentions, politely inform them that the new feature is going to cost extra, and then suggest that, due to the misunderstanding, you're going to reduce your price for that implementation to $X, where $X is either the price you actually have in mind (if you don't mind being less than 100% truthful for the sake of fairness) or a slightly lower price (if you're willing to pay for their mistake so as to maintain more truthfulness). Yes, it can be hard to admit to mistakes you didn't actually make, but it's often necessary to not piss off some people.

I disagree. Personally, I would say no to the unrealistic version, wherein I have no escape clause, every time. I simply value the negative what ifs too strongly negative for it to be a rational wager. However, rationally speaking, the only way you can say no to the realistic version is if you're Catholic or otherwise have a strong (in your own mind) reason to be unwilling to commit suicide. Or if you have some reason you want to be old and decrepit, I guess.

Kind of the latter, really. While the true meaning was clear from context here, it's very easy to make the same mistake in other contexts without the true meaning being so clear. And, unlike a number of other common mistakes, this is one that can really bite you in the ass in some contexts, so it's good to set the record straight before your gluteals are masticated.

I don't think your first sentence really matches the rest of what you're saying.

Obviously I'm not telling you to pull out your full spec and implementation roadmap to discuss with everyone on the street. But you should be willing to share the core idea in a way that anyone can understand. The "what", not the "how", essentially.

You can always divulge more if someone shows interest in helping you out, but you have to garner that interest by being willing to tell them something.

This was one of the earliest things I was taught about entrepreneurship, and it's been beat into my head over time: share your bloody idea. With damn near everyone who'll listen. Your idea is worthless; it's the execution that matters (we already know that here, of course). However, there are two reasons the idea is worthless. We're all used to the "if you aren't executing you have nothing with which to make money" reason, but the other reason is that somebody else already has your idea, almost certainly. The less earth-shattering it is, the more likely somebody else has the same idea, of course, but even some of the earth shattering ideas are floating around other peoples' heads. Thus, the goal isn't to keep a secret, but rather to get the information out to whoever can help you with the resources you need to ship, whether it's connecting you with developers, designers, investors, whatever, or simply providing you with essential feedback.

I'd be willing to wager that more projects have been killed from this sort of paranoia-fueled secret keeping than by people stealing ideas.

> 2) ... But a circle's area increases as (pi)r^2. That's an exponential increase.

No, no, no, no, no. "exponential" != "has an exponent". Exponential means the variable is the exponent, as in 2^n. The word you're looking for is "quadratic".

Ah, that's a much different case. There's a (true) horror story about an upper division physics course at Harvey Mudd. It was an unlimited time proctored exam. The prof apparently expected the students to spend 4-5 hours, but when nobody had left by then he had to order some pizzas to feed them. If I remember the story correctly, most of the students exceeded 20 hours and, I might be making this up, but I believe a couple got into the 40-some range.

This isn't really the usual case (most of the unlimited time exams are take home exams rather than proctored), but it's still terrifying.

> I was fortunate to be a student of Dr. Bose many years ago. No other professor gave unlimited time on exams, plus free Toscanini's ice cream to boot!

Unlimited time and free food is a good thing? I went to Harvey Mudd and the only thing more terrifying than an unlimited time exam was an unlimited time exam with free food. It was a surefire indicator that you were about to lose a significant chunk of your time working on a nigh-impossible exam. I guess it's just weird to find out that this isn't universal.

I know I'm not really supposed to have an opinion on these things, being a recently-created account and all, but I must respectfully disagree. If you really want to learn, using upvotes as proxy for correctness is a suboptimal way to do so, especially regarding topics without any clear cut answers. Being new to this site, I've actually spent roughly equal amounts of time with and without vote counts an I've noticed a pretty big difference in my own habits. In particular, rather than acting like HN is an omniscient font of knowledge, I treat it much more like wikipedia: a springboard for further exploration of topics.

Oh, I didn't think you intended to trick me. Perhaps some context that'd help you understand my state of mind when I wrote that: while I may be a dev and hacker professionally and as a hobby, I went to university in mathematics specialising in number theory. I'm expected to know silly things like the difference between "one way function" and "trapdoor function", so it's a touch off-putting when I forget.

> What would a trapdoor value be for SHA1 ? Okay, you got me there. It's been long enough since I've actually used the term that I seemed to have remembered it being the same as one-way. Oops.

As for the parenthetical, I'm not sure I take your meaning properly. If you are asking where I learned that hash functions don't have to be one way it seems to be an odd question, but I just checked Wikipedia and it agrees with me, at least.

I agree with your final conclusion, that Base64 is an encoding, but it is also a hash function and hash functions can very well be two-way. In fact, the trivial hash function just maps data to itself, which is trivially reversible. However, we do want our cryptographic hash functions to be trapdoors to be of use.