Hacker News: icarus127

New comment by icarus127 in "Dijkstra’s algorithm and the Fibonacci heap"

icarus127 — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 13:39:11 +0000

You may be interested in this paper www.cs.ox.ac.uk/ralf.hinze/publications/ICFP01.pdf. It solves Dijkstra's algorithm as an example for the implementation of a priority search queue data structure, which is very similar to a priority search tree. These structures act as a heap on one index and a search tree on a second index. So you get both efficient update and find-min.

New comment by icarus127 in "Mozilla's low-overhead open source replay debugger"

icarus127 — Wed, 26 Mar 2014 13:34:46 +0000

I don't know about the author but not all of us oppose Gay marriage.

New comment by icarus127 in "Revelations of N.S.A. Spying Cost U.S. Tech Companies"

icarus127 — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 19:27:11 +0000

Sure but unless this new service is along the lines of "I generate my own key pair _and then only ever give Google my public key_" there's no way they're getting me to trust them. And I seriously doubt that's something they are going to try to do, it's to much of a niche market for Google IMO.

New comment by icarus127 in "Revelations of N.S.A. Spying Cost U.S. Tech Companies"

icarus127 — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 17:59:38 +0000

    Not only are those wise words for users, enabling that
    way of working, and making security an easy verifiable  
    default, and, is going to be the only way to heal this  
    problem for US tech companies. And they have been slow 
    to  get started.

The trouble is the service providers have a significant vested interest in having access to your data. Google will never implement a system where only you have access to your data because they make a lot of money by accessing your data.

Depending on where you want to draw the line it would not be a stretch to say that an advertising company like Google would be eliminating their entire revenue stream by implementing such a system.

New comment by icarus127 in "Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism and Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit"

icarus127 — Sun, 16 Mar 2014 11:42:25 +0000

At my previous job I thought the same thing. They didn't stop people being bullied by superiors and basically did nothing but exit interviews and layoffs. The entire company was really dysfunctional. At my current job HR is _supremely_ competent. The entire organization is more functional and a joy to work for. I think there are subtle but significant effects when people know that it is not okay to behave in a bullying or discriminatory manner because HR takes those things seriously.

New comment by icarus127 in "Please reconsider the Boolean evaluation of midnight"

icarus127 — Sat, 08 Mar 2014 01:57:31 +0000

> variables don't have types, only individual values do.

It really depends on what language you're using. This is more or less true in Python, Ruby, and Javascript. In Lisp generic methods you can specify the type for the input variables and be guaranteed that if you are inside the method the parameters are of that specific type. For optimization reasons you can also declare to the compiler that variables are a specific type. This is really important when doing numeric computations in a tight loop. I've had 50% - 80% performance improvement by declaring types (amounting to hours of run time). I think Groovy and Clojure also allow this but I don't know much about those two.

There's also the maintenance issue though. After a few years of maintaining a fairly large Lisp project I've become pretty convinced that the only way to stay sane, at least for me, is to treat it as a statically typed language. I have asserts and check-type macros all over the place. If variables may have multiple types they can be checked against '(or type1 type2) but things do become more complicated then.

New comment by icarus127 in "Please reconsider the Boolean evaluation of midnight"

icarus127 — Fri, 07 Mar 2014 01:15:08 +0000

That latter's debatable but probably not the former unfortunately.

New comment by icarus127 in "Please reconsider the Boolean evaluation of midnight"

icarus127 — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 20:28:37 +0000

Indeed, the first thing that came into my mind when reading this was "You wouldn't have this problem if the only valid type in a conditional was boolean."

New comment by icarus127 in "GCHQ intercepted webcam images of millions of Yahoo users worldwide"

icarus127 — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 19:51:52 +0000

I think the point was that homosexuality has been taboo for a lot longer than the CIA has been around. So while they obviously have found it useful there's no reason to think they needed to work to keep it taboo for so long.

New comment by icarus127 in "Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only"

icarus127 — Sat, 25 Jan 2014 21:32:47 +0000

>they've gone way beyond being about what any actual women think and care about...

And those articles were written by whom then? Apparently at least one woman actually cares about those issues. Or are you trying to say that by going "that far" she or they are not "actual" women? Whatever that means.

New comment by icarus127 in "From Object Oriented Programming to Functional Programming"

icarus127 — Sun, 15 Dec 2013 15:20:14 +0000

Could you elaborate or provide links to examples of what you mean by solving this with codata?

New comment by icarus127 in "America is separating into peasants and scholar-gentry"

icarus127 — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 03:10:39 +0000

My point was not that no guys do, of course I know some do. The OP used 'guys' to seemingly include all men. My point was that, no, not all men do, so you don't get to play the "everyone does it so it's okay" rationalization card.

New comment by icarus127 in "America is separating into peasants and scholar-gentry"

icarus127 — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 02:27:17 +0000

None of the guys I'm around, nor myself, think that's okay just because women aren't present.

New comment by icarus127 in "FBI – Cyber’s Most Wanted"

icarus127 — Sat, 07 Dec 2013 00:19:41 +0000

I notice substantial overlap between the things these men are wanted for and what the NSA and FBI have been doing....

New comment by icarus127 in "My Hardest Bug Ever"

icarus127 — Fri, 01 Nov 2013 19:37:58 +0000

I was thinking the same thing. At my last job we had one dev board (TI ARM/DSP SOC + lots of custom hardware) that we could reset with a static discharge into the carpet 6 - 8 feet away. That took us a while to figure out :p

New comment by icarus127 in "Martin Gräßlin, KDE: "Good Bye, Ubuntu""

icarus127 — Fri, 01 Nov 2013 15:53:57 +0000

One might say that being polite and not insulting people are traits of merit.

New comment by icarus127 in "Dry Ice Bombs at LAX"

icarus127 — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 14:15:54 +0000

A lot of people are criticizing Schneier for lack of empathy or too much nonchalance. Can we really have too much nonchalance in our post Afghanistan/Iraq/Drone strikes/Surveillance state world?

I think about what our world and the U.S. might be like if we had "too much" nonchalance in the face of the 9/11 attacks and had simply done nothing in response. It's hard for me to come up with a scenario that is worse than what resulted from our response.

New comment by icarus127 in "Google is defragging Android"

icarus127 — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 00:47:45 +0000

I'm interested, what is the open source core in OSX and iOS? I was not aware of any. I know they share code with BSD but I didn't think it was to the extent that one could compare Apple's OS relationship with BSD to Android's relationship with Linux.

New comment by icarus127 in "Why is FreeBSD deprecating GCC in favor of Clang/LLVM?"

icarus127 — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 00:16:00 +0000

I too share your general optimism about the current state of open source. I really hope that you are correct in your conclusion that the GPL mandate is unnecessary because, as we see here, many projects are trying to get away from it. However, I feel we have a number of historical examples of what happens when constraints are lifted in a space that has a number of very powerful players. None of them look like anything I want the Open Source movement to look like.

New comment by icarus127 in "Why is FreeBSD deprecating GCC in favor of Clang/LLVM?"

icarus127 — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 23:13:41 +0000

I was thinking this as well. I see the GPL, and Copy Left licensing in general, as a sort of regulatory force in free software. If you want to participate the GPL will put constraints on you to play nice with others in the FOSS space.

Given what happened in the financial markets as they were deregulated I am extremely suspicious of the notion that removing the constraints of Copy Left will actually be positive in the long run. I have no doubt that it will help companies like Apple but I don't see the benefit for the wider community of developers.