A very good article, though I wish the author weren't so enamored with David Brooks clichés.
Readit Newsbeoba commented on Index Funds Considered Harmful (Possibly Evil) byrnehobart.com/blog/inde... · Posted by u/byrneseyeview
You're just annoyed that you made a bad decision with your money, and feel that someone else should shoulder the blame. Yet somehow it isn't the fault of the active investors who take all that expense cash in return for consistently unperforming; no sir, blame the indexers! Is this what your "Financial Advisor" told you while he was skimming 1-5% off the top?
In other news, Buggy Whip Owner Considers Cars Harmful (Possibly Evil).
Looks like this could solve the problem of network interfaces renaming themselves after reboots. Hooray!
I have a lot of local video files, and I've (briefly) tried the Boxee software a couple times. It has a feature where it tries to identify that media, but I've found it to be comedically awful at doing so, especially when it comes to TV series, where it tends to pick out maybe one or two episodes from a given series directory, then for some reason completely ignore the rest, even though they're all following the same format in their respective filenames.
Does anyone know of a way to just turn this off entirely? I already have things organized by directory/filename. From what I can tell, the current 'solution' is to manually go through each file and fix whatever stupid information was auto-detected. Which is backwards, because if someone's anal enough to deal with that, they've likely already got things meticulously organized how they want by directory/filename, so why not just go by that directly?
I get the strong impression that they didn't really make local media playback a priority.
Open source != GPL licensed apps.
I know little about MS embracing open source, but regarding Apple check out these: http://www.apple.com/opensource/ , http://opensource.apple.com/
If I got it right Apple has little problems with GPL apps on App store, GPL proponents have.
No, they've both chosen a distribution model which is incompatible with any software containing GPLv3 code. Sure, if the code is 100% yours, you can do whatever you want with it since you own the copyright. But if it has ever accepted contributions from anybody else under GPL terms, then it can't be done without breaking those terms.
They could work out a process for developers who want to contribute GPLed apps, but they've decided not to.
beoba commented on Typical programming interview questions. maxnoy.com/interviews.htm... · Posted by u/gaiusparx
I'm going to play devil's advocate and say that while it is good to know these things, they're no longer essential. I graduated two years ago, and have been developing in Ruby since then, I haven't seen a linked list since College. Why?, because I chose to work with a newer language, with a higher level of abstraction. The programmer of the near future will have a different set of challenges to previously. In the same vein, the guys who graduated 10-15 years ago weren't learning Fortran. But 25 or 30 years ago, I'm guessing they were.
Here's a quick example of a case where knowledge of data structures and algorithmic complexity is useful, regardless of the language.
Let's say you've got two lists, named "A" and "B", which each have 1000 integers. You want to return a list of unique integers which are present in both lists (ie the intersection of two lists). These 'lists' could be arrays or linked lists.
The brute force method would be something like this:
Out = []
for a in A:
for b in B:
if a == b and !Out.contains(b)://O(n) list search
Out.append(b)
return Out
---
A better way is to sort one or both of the lists then do the comparisons along each of them (this syntax assumes the lists are specifically arrays, but it'd effectively be the same for linked lists):
Out = []
sort(A)
sort(B)
b = 0
for a in xrange(len(A)):
vala = A[a]
valb = B[b]
if vala == valb:
Out.append(vala)
++a
++b
elif vala < valb:
++a
else://vala > valb
++b
return Out
Not bad, definitely better than what we were doing before. But we might be able to go a little better...
---
Yet another way is to use some hash sets, which (generally) have O(1) insertions and retrievals, and only store unique values, such that if you insert the same value twice, the second insertion is effectively ignored. We can do something like this:
Out_set = set([])
A_set = set([a in A])
for b in B:
if A_set.contains(b)://O(1) set search
Out_set.append(b)
return list(Out_set)//optional, could return Out_set
---
So just by using our knowledge of data structures, we've turned ~1000000000 iterations into ~2000-3000 iterations. This is on the order of reducing the distance to the moon to around a kilometer. And that's just with two lists that are limited to 1000 items each.
And this sort of thing is a pretty common scenario in any language, no matter how 'abstracted' it is.
beoba commented on Typical programming interview questions. maxnoy.com/interviews.htm... · Posted by u/gaiusparx
What sort of programming positions?
I've done a fair amount of web development in PHP & Python (as well as introductory C++ & Java). I had to look up "linked list" on Google just to get some understanding of what that is.
Woah, you may want to learn about those.
Understanding algorithmic complexity and knowing which data structure(s) to use to solve a given problem are universal skills.
beoba commented on Why I don't care very much about tablets anymore arstechnica.com/staff/car... · Posted by u/zdw
beoba commented on Why I don't care very much about tablets anymore arstechnica.com/staff/car... · Posted by u/zdw
I think it's interesting that he mentions that monitor + keyboard is better than a tablet because it separates out the input from the output areas and the "hands don't get in the way". But if you take the total surface of the keyboard plus your desktop monitors, it's way bigger than the area of the tablet. Make a giant tablet that's 32"x32" or some such, and I think it could be superior to monitor + keyboard for some things. The tablet lets you mix what areas are input and what are output for various applications, and that's way more flexible than being locked into fixed proportions.
https://www.microsoft.com/surface/
All that's missing is a smug logo, and it'll be a hit!
(also mentioned in the article)
We're not trying to get into Harvard, so not particularly relevant.
While you may be a lurker here, and so may not have it, many of us have a "flag" button. This will delete the article from the site if a pretty small number of us click it.
Therefore, I wish, in addition to this button, I also had a button that said "has some value, just get it out of the curated HN space, and transfers it to reddit".
So if it's interesting to hackers, it's via politics (which HN tends to be flag happy about), and about a stage in life where pretty much everyone here is past (college admissions), to an institution which isn't really that common for the startupy type of person to strive for (usually preferring Stanford or MIT).
I do think it's interesting, I just would prefer to see it on a site where the politics can be discussed without the stink of political opinion interfering with the startup community.
I view sticking stuff like this on HN is akin to having heated political discussions before interviewing for a job or partnership: a universally bad idea.
I wasn't being glib. It is an interesting article, just not one I want to see change my opinion of people I discuss technical things with all the time. People tend to be more blind to assumption about politics than many other topics, so it's a good way to make yourself think less of people.
Things close to this I would think on topic for HN:
A blog post going into how the hacker community isn't like this.
The ways that scions of tech are different than other parents when the second generation comes around.
Etc.
Arbitrary illustrative excerpt:
Whether American or Chinese, individuals who focus too much on ‘achievement,’ and who believe the illusion that they’ve achieved everything simply through their own honest hard work, often think very little of everyone else as a result.