<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: gchpaco</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gchpaco</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 07 Jul 2026 04:09:36 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=gchpaco" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "The most prized degree in India became the most worthless"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The main difference is that engineers have a code of ethics they're expected to uphold, with the threat of taking away your certification if you don't.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2020 16:37:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23156025</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23156025</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23156025</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "Tree planting is a great idea that could become a dangerous climate distraction"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you read the article, they discuss it there.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Jan 2020 16:47:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22171094</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22171094</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22171094</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "Why Generics?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And said notation causes the generic type system to be Turing complete, as in the Java case.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 31 Jul 2019 22:10:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20579070</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20579070</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20579070</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "Algorithm Solves Graph Isomorphism in Record Time (2015)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There are only two "natural" problem classes known that are not either definitely in P or definitely in NP, and this article concerns one of them.  (The other is integer factorization / discrete logs).  And I'm not sure anybody believes there are any natural problems that are <i>inherently</i> in this in between state.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 May 2019 21:28:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20005435</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20005435</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20005435</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "Logical difficulties in modern mathematics (2012)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In general his complaints regarding logic are incoherent.  A function is not a messy weird object in mathematics; it's a possibly infinite set of ordered pairs where there are no duplicates of the first element of the ordered pair.  That's it all it is, formally.  Or "class" is a concept that has highly specific meaning in NBG theory—in ZFC it's not a formal distinction and so there's a transformation that must be obeyed where "x \in Class" means "{ x | x satisfies class definition}"; which due to Foundation must be the subset of some other, preexisting, class (and thus is Russell's paradox defeated).  Almost all of these things <i>exist</i> and <i>are present</i> and <i>are extremely well defined</i> in the theory, he just doesn't <i>like</i> them for some reason.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 14 Feb 2019 18:45:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19164593</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19164593</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19164593</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "C++ Modules Might Be Dead-On-Arrival"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The C and I presume C++ standard has been very carefully avoiding the idea of a preprocessor being separate <i>at all</i>.  The standard was very carefully worded to prevent that being necessary, because most C compilers <i>do not have a separate preprocessor</i>.  It is only Unix heritage compilers that really have one, and even they're not consistent about it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:19:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19022525</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19022525</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19022525</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "The Remarkable Persistence of 24x36"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's a number of fisheyes that produce circular images on rectangular film (obviously, not using the entirety of the film surface).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 03 Oct 2018 16:19:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18131781</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18131781</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18131781</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "The Remarkable Persistence of 24x36"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No, but it is the one name that people remember, and saves much explanation.  The Rolleicord, the Mamiya C series, and the YashicaMats, one of which is my TLR, were more consumer oriented.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 03 Oct 2018 16:18:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18131775</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18131775</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18131775</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "The Remarkable Persistence of 24x36"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The #2 Brownie came out in 1901 and shot 6cm x 9cm, and all of the surviving Brownies I've seen shot rectangular formats.  There was the Brownie 127 which shot square, but I only learned of its existence just now; have never seen one in the wild, probably because finding 127 film is functionally impossible.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 03 Oct 2018 01:32:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18127032</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18127032</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18127032</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "The Remarkable Persistence of 24x36"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Too small, slide mounts were already standardized on 24x36, and the square was never all that popular among the general photographer.  The reason why the square shape in 120 was originally developed was a technical hack.  Since it outputs a square, there was never any need to hold a Hasselblad vertically; just take the photo and crop it to suit.  The only square consumer oriented cameras I can think of are twin-lens reflex cameras like the Rolleiflex, which are delightful but somewhat uncommon.  A number of folks started trying to make use of the square format as a square format, but it was not originally, I think, intended for that purpose.<p>Re: too small; an 8x10, one of the smaller standard print formats for portraits, is about an 8x enlargement from a 35mm frame.  With modern materials and good technique, 8x-11x is feasible, but starting to push it at the edges; I have printed 13x17s off 35mm but I would not want to push it much larger.  35mm does 4x6s, 5x7s and 8x10s perfectly reasonably, which is what it spent most of its time doing for common consumer work.  It's worth noting that one of the other common consumer cameras of the 1940s was the Brownie, which output 6cmx9cm images and was routinely contact printed, producing something smaller even than a 4x6.<p>120 produces images that are between 1.8x (in the 645 format) or 2.5x (in most others) as large, physically, meaning that the common enlargements are only 4x-5x.  If you push it, with quality equipment, you start getting into print sizes that are super clumsy to handle like 20x24.  I've never printed, personally, anything larger than a 16x20.  If you do your own wet processing they're also nicer to work with—35mm negatives are real small and kinda fiddly.  4x5 sheets are also delightful to work with, of course, but they require fighting the camera in the field.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 03 Oct 2018 01:04:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18126919</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18126919</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18126919</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "Introducing Git protocol version 2"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I damn near released a (private) message protocol without a version field a couple months ago, and I know better.  Fortunately stopped myself and added it before any actual data got released.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 18 May 2018 21:20:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17105048</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17105048</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17105048</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "Regex that only matches itself"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A formal language is basically just a mathematical set of acceptable strings made up of symbols in a (typically finite) alphabet; thus the smallest is probably the empty set, or if you insist on an accepting path, a set containing only the empty string.<p>The interesting part comes up when you want to match an infinite set of strings with an algorithm.  Probably the simplest such algorithm would be "regardless of input, accept" which isn't exactly useful but would suffice.<p>It's dissatisfying to have an algorithm that puts weird, arbitrary restrictions on composing languages; for example it's usually the case that if you take a language L1 and a language L2 that are both acceptable to the algorithm, the concatenation (for every string in L1 and every string in L2, the concatenation of their strings is in the new language) language is usually acceptable to the algorithm.<p>Some commonly used languages do not have all of these properties; in particular the intersection of two context-free languages may not be a CFL, nor the complement.  Deterministic context free languages are even more restrictive.  You seem to need to give some things up as you move up the language hierarchy in power; in particular string homomorphism and intersection seem to be mutually exclusive in languages more powerful than regular expressions.<p>If you're interested, the theory of abstract families of languages has been studied, although I do not know a lot about it myself.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 12 Nov 2016 03:08:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12936379</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12936379</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12936379</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "Bi-Directional Replication for PostgreSQL v1.0"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Depends on the database, but Cassandra, for example, has quorum mode for writes, which requires a majority of the cluster members ack the write.  This can be enabled on a per-query basis, and also for reads.<p>The other way of doing it is things like CRDTs (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_type" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_...</a>) which have a join operation for any two data values.<p>You have to keep it in the back of your mind that it's a thing, but working without consistency can be done.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Aug 2016 21:26:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12278921</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12278921</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12278921</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The printing is the fun part, anyway.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 Jul 2016 09:29:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114010</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114010</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114010</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I love my X-Pro, and I loved Fuji film before it, but remember Fuji has never been under the anti-trust concerns Kodak has, and that forced them to divest the film processing and professional camera arms.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 Jul 2016 09:25:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12113994</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12113994</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12113994</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "The problem with reinforced concrete"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm not competent to explain why Tacoma Narrows failed, but it obviously wasn't up to design load.  The existence of large sheets of glass falling off buildings and endangering people from multiple different installations strongly indicates that someone botched something.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 25 Jun 2016 23:52:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11978664</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11978664</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11978664</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "Horizon 1.0: a realtime, open-source JavaScript back end from RethinkDB"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There are two major issues that crop up in my experience.<p>* Node as a runtime is deeply mediocre, in my experience.  You can usually solve this by throwing more (usually virtualized) hardware at the problem.<p>* Meteor's architecture is (at present) tied into MongoDB's oplog tailing.  You can scale it up through sharding, through alternate libraries, and DDP itself is not tied to MongoDB at all.  IIRC fixing this was a goal for Meteor 2.0.<p>Both of these can be worked around.  If nothing else, the Meteor web side will talk to anything doing DDP, and DDP is not that hard to deal with.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 May 2016 00:36:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11718828</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11718828</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11718828</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "The Tools of a Blind Programmer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I do not, myself, know why this is the case.  I can come up with several plausible reasons; for example, you're basically coming up with an alternate input device for your computer piggybacked onto something that's already there.  Additionally these programs basically are the computer if you're blind; you develop a lot of experience with them quickly because the alternative is not using it at all.  And some amount of it is probably cultural/historical, we make it hard because it's always been hard.  Truly, I don't know, and I don't know anyone who does.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 04 Apr 2016 06:52:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11419863</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11419863</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11419863</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "The Tools of a Blind Programmer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It is ... difficult for me to describe just how dangerous it is to try to use 3 dimensional intuitions in a higher dimensional space.  As the number of dimensions increases the amount of "space" there is for things to get weird get much more complicated; for example any knot that exists in 3 dimensions can be untied trivially in a 4 dimensional space.<p>Suffice to say if you try to use your ordinary everyday life intuitions doing higher dimensional mathematics you will continuously embarrass yourself until you learn not to.  Some folks develop the necessary adjustments and have higher dimensional intuitions; I do not and have to do the math anywhere higher than around 4.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 04 Apr 2016 06:49:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11419847</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11419847</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11419847</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gchpaco in "The Tools of a Blind Programmer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Part of the problem is that most accessibility software has a hell of a learning curve, that the blind have implicitly overcome already to use the thing at all. (e.g. emacspeak)  It can be very daunting to try to use it as a sighted person with a blindfold over their eyes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 03 Apr 2016 23:20:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11418316</link><dc:creator>gchpaco</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11418316</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11418316</guid></item></channel></rss>