Hacker News: hn9780470248775

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)"

hn9780470248775 — Mon, 15 May 2017 19:35:14 +0000

I literally wrote hand-written letters to IBM asking questions about BASIC.

Later: Borland Pascal came with a glorious full bookshelf of printed documention, and instant-access context sensitive help within the (console mode) IDE.

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "Robinhood stock trading app confirms $110M raise at $1.3B valuation"

hn9780470248775 — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 05:11:17 +0000

Why?

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "How AirBnB's Data Hid the Facts in NYC [pdf]"

hn9780470248775 — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 01:58:57 +0000

Did that happen?

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "Why is electricity so hard to understand? (1989)"

hn9780470248775 — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 23:52:02 +0000

Not really.

Electrons do have mass, but a device powered by an electric current will generally have the electrons flowing out at the same rate that they flow in.

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "Secret Ingredients: China’s “Fake Food”"

hn9780470248775 — Sun, 11 Sep 2016 01:48:45 +0000

> poultry feathers or hog hair

Yum! I'm not sure the truth is all that much less disgusting than the myth.

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "Google X: Waiting for a Moonshot"

hn9780470248775 — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 14:05:10 +0000

If these points are true, then why has X been spun off into a separate entity (just "X", under the Alphabet holding company, with increasing separation from Google)?

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "The Science of the Missing Gravitational Waves"

hn9780470248775 — Fri, 22 Jul 2016 03:23:40 +0000

If you're talking about making a map of the astrophysical or cosmological backgrounds of gravitational waves -- you're right. As you integrate (i.e. capture more data), the noise will tend to cancel out while the signal will reinforce itself. But the problem is that the signal-to-noise-ratio is so small -- essentially zero -- that, with current detector sensitivity, it would take literally forever to get an image with any features at all.

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "Autonomous corporation “The DAO” has become the biggest crowdfunded project"

hn9780470248775 — Mon, 16 May 2016 17:08:38 +0000

> Does that mean Apple is worth less than its market cap?

Yes.

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "Space Shuttle vs. Buran"

hn9780470248775 — Sat, 09 Apr 2016 21:26:02 +0000

Obligatory shuttle reading: http://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "The 'premature optimization is evil' myth (2010)"

hn9780470248775 — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 21:50:33 +0000

> quicksort O(log(n)).

Quicksort is O(n log n) average case and O(n^2) worst-case.

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "America's High School Graduates Look Like Other Countries' High School Dropouts"

hn9780470248775 — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 01:30:51 +0000

> It's the top of the bell curve that matters.

I think that this attitude has gotten us into a pretty big mess.

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "Harper Lee has died"

hn9780470248775 — Fri, 19 Feb 2016 19:25:17 +0000

I take it you haven't read "Go Set a Watchman"...

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "A Message to Our Customers"

hn9780470248775 — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 21:15:25 +0000

> at least one having MD License Plates

Don't vehicles used by federal agencies typically bear U.S. Government license plates?

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "Berkeley AI Materials"

hn9780470248775 — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 19:40:22 +0000

It's the Department of Computer Science, not the Department of Programming.

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "Etsy stock has lost 76% of its value in 9 months"

hn9780470248775 — Sat, 16 Jan 2016 02:50:21 +0000

Lost 76% of its value... And still valued at nearly a billion dollars.

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "Unicode: The people who made the internet open to anyone"

hn9780470248775 — Wed, 06 Jan 2016 01:57:51 +0000

Regular expressions strike me as a far more fundamental CS concept than Unicode.

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "The best icon is a text label"

hn9780470248775 — Wed, 23 Dec 2015 01:01:32 +0000

Doing laundry in Poland, I was grateful for the standard icons, whose meaning a quick Google search revealed.

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "The best icon is a text label"

hn9780470248775 — Sat, 19 Dec 2015 01:07:34 +0000

The standardized laundry icons are way better than the alternative (no standard icons, or verbose text in a potentially foreign language).

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "Holiday Gift Ideas from Y Combinator"

hn9780470248775 — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 21:45:09 +0000

SkyMall is back!

New comment by hn9780470248775 in "Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change"

hn9780470248775 — Mon, 07 Dec 2015 21:05:47 +0000

Jarringly different in style than the rest of the site.