Hacker News Reader

screwpermanon Signs that you're a bad programmer

While I'm not an MIT student, I think the school puts a huge emphasis on being pragmatic ( see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=530659 ). Also, given the huge disparities in abilities of the freshmen there, I'd reckon that, more often than not, an MIT education would be a humbling experience.

screwpermanon The Art of Failure (2000)

Oh, what a debacle! Even after being such a devout tennis buff, I have confused "game" with "match". Or maybe I just can't read :(.

screwpermanon The Art of Failure (2000)

She was leading 4-1 and serving at 40-30, meaning that she was one point from winning the game

Eh, what?

screwpermanon What You Learned About How Planes Fly Was Probably Wrong

Bernoulli's principle also doesn't explain how planes can fly upside-down.

screwpermanon India's school for the poor but gifted

Here is a documentary on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMSYGLbIUxc

screwpermanon Six Visual Proofs

If you like this, you'll love the book Proofs without Words: Exercises in Visual Thinking: http://www.amazon.com/Proofs-without-Words-Exercises-Classro...

screwpermanon The Underworked American Child

I'm in India right now and I've spent a total of 14 years here. The places I'm referring to are the ones the article seems to talk about: China, India, Japan and Korea.

A few months ago, there was a discussion on this right here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=482257

screwpermanon The Underworked American Child

We teach people to be the status quo, we don't encourage them to excel.

Asians rarely value individuality. Doesn't the American system do better in teaching kids to be different from the norm?

screwpermanon China embarrasses US in NSA hacking contest

It always seemed like more of a cultural difference than a financial one to me. Don't you think that TopCoder could be useful for American high school and undergraduate students, who could be preparing for the IOI and ICPC respectively? Fun fact: this year's TopCoder Open Algorithm Championship winner was a Chinese high school student who never qualified for the IOI.

As an aside, if you don't mind telling me, do you think your participation in the IOI helped get you into grad school at MIT? If so, to what extent?

screwpermanon Compare & vote for search results of Bing, Google and Yahoo in a blind test

Seems like I've finally found a way to Bing for "sex" in India.

screwpermanon 48 of 48

To see the equivalent of this initiative on steriods, take a look at Bihar's Super 30: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMSYGLbIUxc

screwpermanon ServerFault launches - it's StackOverflow for sysadmins

"Great job, Joel."

Joel does 0.1% of the work on StackOverflow and ServerFault. Give Jeff some credit.

screwpermanon Why You Should Know C++

I feel the most compelling reason to use C++ is that it is one of the de facto programming languages in competitions.

screwpermanon Sploj: Project Euler meets Brainf*ck

Hence my italicization in the grandparent comment.

screwpermanon Sploj: Project Euler meets Brainf*ck

I'm not sure what the submitter implies by "Project Euler meets Brainfck". While some "fun" problems on SPOJ involve coding exclusively in esoteric languages such as BF and Whitespace, most others are the standard algorithmic challenges. This site is pretty well-known in the programming contest community.

screwpermanon An education bubble? Data from the explosion of AP tests

Here's a discussion on reddit on an Indian entrance examination: http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/8bxt9/an_indian_underg...

The exam is more rigorous and broader in scope than the APs. It also has a far more punishing "grading curve" (a 1.8% admit rate). The general notion among Indians seems to be that preparation -- and only preparation -- matters.

While I agree that not every American should aspire to be the next president, one should put things in a global perspective: it's only fair that water-deprived kids from Third World countries who spent their childhood cramming end up taking the jobs of the more fortunate who did not take a single simple AP exam. In an earlier post on HN, a highly upvoted comment went like "take every AP exam". That is a good idea, but it hardly ambitious at all, given that you are in the land of opportunity. Participating in olympiads and science fairs is far more worthwhile in every way.

screwpermanon 3D Realms shuts down. No Duke Nukem forever

I thought the parent might be downmodded to hell here on HN. Only time will tell.

The guy who wrote that comment is Slava Pestov, author of the Factor programming language.

screwpermanon NIN Reaction to iPhone App Store Rejection

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screwpermanon Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages

O'Reilly has come up with some decent books recently, including The Productive Programmer and Beautiful Architecture. They don't seems to have got much attention.

screwpermanon Ask HN: I'm in 10th grade and I hate school. Any suggestions?

Just to put my advice in perspective: I'm an Indian who will possibly be attending (a pretty good) public university this year. I'm the typical HN/reddit geek: started programming when I was 9, know around 9 programming languages, quite some bit of theory, etc. etc. In school in India, I was bored all the time, got mediocre grades, and had donkeys for teachers. Here's what I feel you should do:

1. Challenge yourself

So, you've got to choose from these kinds of activities:

  A: Activities that you enjoy doing
  B: Activities that *might* impress (say) the college admissions staff

I mostly did stuff exclusive to type A; bad idea. Of course, never do anything that comes only within B. Find what comes under the union of the two.

You're in America: you don't hunt for opportunities, you are flooded with them. Someone on this thread recommended "taking every AP exam available". Sure, do that: it's really important. But that's not ambitious at all: AP exams cover only about 10% of what Indian entrance examinations do, and you get to use "calculators" and "appendices" (more like textbooks). Do something real, like aspire to be an IMO/IOI/IPhO/IChO/ISEF medalist (if you don't know what those are, shame on you).

2. Manage your time

I was absolutely dismal at this. But I've started doing it for a month and it really does wonders: I have stopped procrastinating and started to feel less stressed out. I'd recommend you watch the late Randy Pausch's other lecture (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0) or read Getting Things Done. Most of HN can give better advice.

3. Skip school (a lot)

It took me a lot of effort to get my parents to allow me to do this. Alas, it was too late then. Usually, teachers do more harm than good. Read the right books instead of attending their classes.

screwpermanon Narayana Murthy's success mantras for entrepreneurs

One of your older comments might be worth adding: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=62993

Most of his speeches (and Nandan Nilekani's for that matter) are ghost written, by a small team of smart MBA s from local elite schools like IIMs(Indian Institute Of Management). One of my school buddies is on that team that's how I know.

screwpermanon Steve Yegge on ten great books

He wrote a/an MMORPG in 100000 lines of Java: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyvern_(Online_Game)

He also ported Ruby on Rails to Javascript: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rhino-on-rails.html

screwpermanon Ask HN: Learning C

If you enjoyed reading those 29 pages, you might find the entire book a decent read as well: http://www.amazon.com/C-Traps-Pitfalls-Andrew-Koenig/dp/0201...

screwpermanon Ask HN: Learning C

I'd second this. In fact, Steve Yegge once said this about K&R ( http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/ten-great-books ):

This is an odd little book. It's frequently mistaken for an introductory programming book, which inevitably leads to frustration. It's not a good way to learn how to program; it expects that you're already familiar with machine architecture, assembly language, compilers, and at least one other high-level language.

It's not even a very good way to learn C. The idioms and best-practices for C programming have evolved substantially, even since the second edition was published, and some of the code samples look a bit dated.

As the parent said, you'll appreciate C only if you learn about machine architecture and Unix. Diving into a large codebase will get you acquainted with "modern" C.

I've found the book C Traps and Pitfalls to be the book to get you to think like a C programmer. The C Puzzle Book is pretty good for exercises, and Expert C Programming does a good job exposing the ugly side of C.

screwpermanon Coding Horror: Should Competent Programmers be "Mathematically Inclined"?

I think Jeff doesn't know C

Here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001216.html

surely Stackoverflow is not making that much money.

But StackOverflow delivers, more so than most YC startups.

screwpermanon [dead]

Didn't pg once write:

It is greatly to America's advantage that it is a congenial atmosphere for the right sort of unruliness—that it is a home not just for the smart, but for smart-alecks. And hackers are invariably smart-alecks. If we had a national holiday, it would be April 1st.

So wouldn't posting a "gag link" epitomize the hacker spirit (or something like that)?

screwpermanon Gladwell: Getting In, The social logic of Ivy League admissions

Good point. Having rich parents seems to be a big ace in the hole here.

screwpermanon Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python

I read SICP when I was 14; this was a couple of years after I came across some pg/Lisp stuff. It would be absurd if MIT CS students remain ignorant of 6.001 given their institute's really hardcore hacker culture. Hence, I fail to see what this entire fuss is all about.

screwpermanon Firefox May Already Be Dead

I could never get myself to use that; it's possibly because I refuse to remap one control key to the caps lock.

I usually navigate by searching for some substring of the link.

screwpermanon Firefox May Already Be Dead

I'm really sorry for not making myself clear: I meant that I would start using Chrome if it had such a feature.

And yeah, Firemacs is awesome. As a matter of fact, it does allow for navigation using some vi bindings by default. Even though I'm an Emacs guy, I find using hjkl a lot more comfortable than C-b C-n C-p C-f. I've heard great thing about vimperator, too.