<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: gloob</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gloob</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 11:26:02 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=gloob" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "“You're not allowed science any more”"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> So, please forgive us our gallows humor about this.<p>Apologies for my pedantry, but dreaming about harming people is actually pretty much the opposite of gallows humour. A more appropriate phrase might be "power fantasy."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 24 Jul 2014 16:16:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8080407</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8080407</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8080407</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "Satoshi Nakamoto denies being Dorian Nakamoto"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's okay for you to be wrong about something.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Mar 2014 05:36:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7358678</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7358678</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7358678</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "Ask HN: Why isn't Erlang more popular?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's unclear to me whether you want "to write a program" or to "get the maximum out of Haskell". Those are two very different goals.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Feb 2014 19:05:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7278718</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7278718</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7278718</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "The Real Truth About the STEM Shortage"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>But first, how about we let capital usurp the political system for its own ends? That seems like a reasonable compromise to me.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 01 Jun 2013 18:56:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5805392</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5805392</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5805392</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "Quake 3 engine in Rust"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I, too, feel that perfectly uniform brace positioning is one of the critical technical challenges facing any new language today. There is no longer any excuse to get such an important and fundamental advance wrong.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:05:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5540094</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5540094</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5540094</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "Vector vengeance: Researchers claim they can kill the pixel within five years"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>By that standard, geometric population growth is killing people.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Dec 2012 22:20:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912782</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912782</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912782</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I agree with you entirely and unreservedly. The scare quotes in my comment were to poke fun at the idea that a person who holds a set of racist opinions is somehow not a racist.<p>I do maintain that it is, in some sense, a "reasonable" position for a racist to be more offended by incivility than by racism. Not ideal, or even good, but certainly understandable.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 13 Nov 2012 19:50:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4780202</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4780202</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4780202</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "Taobao.com breaks record for online sales in a day - $3.1 billion USD"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>To be fair, that's a reasonable position for a person who's "not really racist, but holds opinions that they concede certainly sound racist when said out loud".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 13 Nov 2012 16:08:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4778681</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4778681</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4778681</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "Solar-powered catamaran goes around the world in 584 days"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Or row.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 05 May 2012 21:26:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3933328</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3933328</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3933328</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "Linus Torvalds on new Chromebook Aura UI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I feel like I'm missing something terribly obvious, but...<p>How does "it is getting harder and slower to move large files over the net" lead to the conclusion "therefore we should store all our large files on the net and retrieve them whenever we want, rather than keep them on local media with negligible latency and huge storage space"?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 01 May 2012 05:42:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3913181</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3913181</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3913181</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "Name: Illegitimate"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Should a Japanese octogenarian whose parents had the poor taste to spell their child's name with a character that would not make it into Unicode expect the same problem?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Apr 2012 21:24:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3901087</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3901087</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3901087</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "The third industrial revolution"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I look forward to being convinced that housing and car manufacturing are more stable and resilient than services.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Apr 2012 04:58:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3897617</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3897617</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3897617</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "The Death of the Level Designer: Procedural Content Generation in Games"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Given that the entire website this article lives on is about roguelikes, and the author is also the developer of a roguelike (Unangband), I imagine he is likely aware of the history of randomly generated levels.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 21 Apr 2012 22:56:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3873255</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3873255</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3873255</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "Meteor meets NoGPL"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Is it normal business practice to use ultimatums instead of negotiation?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 Apr 2012 17:58:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3837966</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3837966</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3837966</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "'9223372036854775807' == '9223372036854775808'"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I agree that, when we are talking about high-level languages, I prefer ones that will transparently convert integers  to bignum when required. I'm just replying to the contention that (paraphrased) "this is a bug in PHP's handling of floating point numbers".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:58:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832572</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832572</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832572</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "'9223372036854775807' == '9223372036854775808'"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This sort of thing is an intrinsic property of floating point math. It has limited precision. When the numbers get sufficiently large, that precision is insufficient to distinguish successive integers. That is to say, this is symptomatic of PHP implementing floating point stuff correctly.<p>This is what ghci (Haskell) says:<p><pre><code>  Prelude> 9223372036844775807 == 9223372036844775808
  False
  Prelude> 9223372036844775807.0 == 9223372036844775808.0
  True
</code></pre>
This is what Python says:<p><pre><code>  >>> 9223372036844775807 == 9223372036844775808
  False
  >>> 9223372036844775807.0 == 9223372036844775808.0
  True
</code></pre>
Here is what SBCL (Common Lisp) says:<p><pre><code>  * (= 9223372036844775807 9223372036844775808)
  NIL
  * (= 9223372036844775807.0 9223372036844775808.0)
  T
</code></pre>
Lua:<p><pre><code>  > print(9223372036844775807 == 9223372036844775808)
  true (!!!!!)
  > print(9223372036844775807.0 == 9223372036844775808.0)
  true
</code></pre>
Javascript:<p><pre><code>  alert(9223372036844775807 == 9223372036844775808)
  true (!!!!!)
  alert(9223372036844775807.0 == 9223372036844775808.0)
  true
</code></pre>
Other languages that will also do this[1]: Javascript, Lua. Languages that won't: anything with actual, honest-to-god integers, and not floats or doubles masquerading as them.[2] Languages that actually handle numbers sensibly: Lisp.[3] I'm not familiar with any others that actually treat rational numbers like rational numbers, but I expect there are some. (It's still, of course, impossible to treat real numbers like real numbers, meaning that this sort of thing will also happen there.)<p>[1] Well, not the string-to-number bit, but whatever.<p>[2] Except for the niggle that they'll still do this when you're using floating point numbers, because this is what floating point numbers <i>do</i>.<p>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_tower" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_tower</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:13:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832354</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832354</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832354</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "Protect IP Renamed E-Parasites Act; Would Create The Great Firewall Of America"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Is there a "canonical" justification for why the US legislative system allows non-germane additions to a bill? Or is ball-of-mud style legislation the norm due to tradition, rather than some philosophical ideal?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 26 Oct 2011 20:24:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3160244</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3160244</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3160244</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "Scott Heiferman (Meetup): "We won't escape real identity, & anonymity will die.""]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You get downvoted a lot. <i>shrugs</i></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:59:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3071162</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3071162</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3071162</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "Oh Yes You Can Use Regexes to Parse HTML"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The correct response to that saying is to point out that regular expressions are significantly simpler than general-purpose, Turing-complete programming languages.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 08 Jul 2011 14:57:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2742689</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2742689</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2742689</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by gloob in "Code's Worst Enemy [2007]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you haven't seen Trusting Trust already, you should read it: <a href="http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html" rel="nofollow">http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html</a> .  It's short and smart.<p>The brief summary is, of course, you can almost never <i>really</i> know "logically what's happening", even in nice reliable languages like Java or Python or Haskell or Ruby or C.[0]<p>The easy solution (and the one that every working programmer makes every day) is to say: well, let's assume that the compiler is non-malicious and has relatively few bugs that will impact me.  That's a fair response.<p>Next we run into the fact that just because you call a function, and that function happens to be called add(x,y), doesn't actually mean that the function will return the sum of x and y.  In the absence of further evidence, it could be an HTTP server or fill your hard drive with infinite copies of Das Kapital or anything at all.  The normal solutions proposed to this are (1) read the documentation, or (2) read the code.  Those are both workable solutions.<p>Then macros come into the picture.  I fail to see how the already-heavily-used techniques of (1) reading documentation and (2) reading the implementation of the macro, which seem to be at least tolerable and mostly workable with functions suddenly fall apart with macros.<p>[0] C and C++ have the preprocessor and macros anyway, which "change your program logically...prior to compilation", so I won't mention them further in this comment.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 Jul 2011 15:17:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2730128</link><dc:creator>gloob</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2730128</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2730128</guid></item></channel></rss>