Hacker News: skolemtotem

New comment by skolemtotem in "Systemisers are better at maths"

skolemtotem — Sat, 04 Aug 2018 11:42:08 +0000

> None of this is particularly controversial

Judging by the fact that most maths degrees are listed as science degrees, it's pretty clear that "mathematics is not science" is a controversial claim.

New comment by skolemtotem in "Computer science as a lost art (2015)"

skolemtotem — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 01:36:05 +0000

Assembly offers just as much capability for abstraction as any other language, and I think that it demands more "ability to grasp abstraction", because you pretty much have to build those abstractions yourself.

New comment by skolemtotem in "TSA is tracking regular travelers like terrorists in secret surveillance program"

skolemtotem — Sun, 29 Jul 2018 11:25:30 +0000

How can this make anyone feel safe if they won't even admit that it's happening?! Moreover, the people are forced to compromise on just about every issue when voting, so they naturally get swayed by marketing and personal priorities. Somehow I doubt that surveillance was much of a priority for anyone.

New comment by skolemtotem in "Is Cobol holding you hostage with Math?"

skolemtotem — Sun, 29 Jul 2018 11:11:01 +0000

Firstly, it's not unjustified to say that someone who thinks vanilla JavaScript is "bare metal" obviously doesn't know what they're talking about. Secondly, as a software-engineer-in-training, I agree - software "engineering" doesn't have much in common with other engineering, but I think that's a good thing for software.

New comment by skolemtotem in "Is Cobol holding you hostage with Math?"

skolemtotem — Sun, 29 Jul 2018 11:06:13 +0000

No, but the right way should at least be easier than the wrong way.

New comment by skolemtotem in "The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher (1991)"

skolemtotem — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 12:03:52 +0000

> orders of magnitude harder

They seem to be at about the same difficulty to me; it would be nice if you could elaborate.

New comment by skolemtotem in "Ask HN: My team mate took credit for my work. What do I do"

skolemtotem — Wed, 25 Jul 2018 19:49:41 +0000

I suggest you try asking on Workplace.StackExchange, too, since the people there have more experience answering this kind of question.

New comment by skolemtotem in "The internals of testing in Rust in 2018"

skolemtotem — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 23:32:26 +0000

Rust takes a similar approach. For unit tests, you use the #[cfg(test)] attribute (/ pragma / directive) for conditional compilation, and #[test] to mark a function that is a unit test, which is run whenever you run the `cargo test` command. Also, any Rust code in Markdown fences in documentation is, by default, also run by `cargo test`, which you can disable for an individual code block by marking it as `rust,norun` instead of `rust`.

New comment by skolemtotem in "Long Live WebGL (2013)"

skolemtotem — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 04:29:10 +0000

That, I sort-of agree with. Layering isn't unique to 3D, so it's debatable whether the incorporation of a depth buffer makes OpenGL a 3D API.

New comment by skolemtotem in "Long Live WebGL (2013)"

skolemtotem — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 04:26:59 +0000

Metal is actually not that bad to live in. Vulkan, on the other hand, is micromanagement hell. I definitely agree with the people saying that it's for "building your own OpenGL".

New comment by skolemtotem in "Long Live WebGL (2013)"

skolemtotem — Sun, 22 Jul 2018 21:24:20 +0000

Yes! I'd suggest learning OpenGL, then Metal, then Vulkan/DX12, which is how I'd rank them from high to low level.

New comment by skolemtotem in "Long Live WebGL (2013)"

skolemtotem — Sun, 22 Jul 2018 21:21:10 +0000

It would always be possible to project a 3D world onto a 2D plane in any 2D graphics API, which is exactly what the projection matrix does in OpenGL.

New comment by skolemtotem in "Rav1e: An experimental AV1 video encoder, designed to be fast and safe"

skolemtotem — Mon, 16 Jul 2018 09:06:49 +0000

Will AV1, or even VP9 for that matter, ever be suitable for realtime encoding, or is that just not their target market?

New comment by skolemtotem in "Libaco: A fast and lightweight C asymmetric coroutine library"

skolemtotem — Sat, 14 Jul 2018 15:26:34 +0000

Hi Byuu! You're a cool guy and I hope I can be like you one day!

New comment by skolemtotem in "XARs: An efficient system for self-contained executables"

skolemtotem — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 18:22:58 +0000

But look, if I started a company called McDonald's, everyone would be confused and it'd probably be illegal. Complaining on forums about names is the open source community's alternative to trademarks.

New comment by skolemtotem in "Learn how to design large-scale systems"

skolemtotem — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 15:35:37 +0000

A single box?! Do we know its specs?

New comment by skolemtotem in "Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as ‘not secure’ starting in July"

skolemtotem — Wed, 11 Jul 2018 17:11:33 +0000

Oh no, someone's going to MITM my shitty blog posts. "Secure" is a word that only makes sense with context, and without that context it only serves to cause irrational panic. I wonder why Google's really doing this.

New comment by skolemtotem in "Arch Linux AUR Repository Found to Contain Malware"

skolemtotem — Wed, 11 Jul 2018 01:44:40 +0000

The App Store is closer to the official Arch repos, since it is vetted by Apple. The AUR is closer to just downloading stuff off the Internet.

New comment by skolemtotem in "After harsh criticism, Facebook quietly pulls services from developing countries"

skolemtotem — Sun, 24 Jun 2018 16:39:29 +0000

This article talks about two issues at the same time: the first is Facebook's insidious "free basics" plan, which I'm 100% against, but the second is Facebook's role as an "accelerant" in Burma, for which I can't really blame them - censorship is pretty hard and you'll always have someone complaining.

New comment by skolemtotem in "Web Assembly and Go: A look to the future"

skolemtotem — Sat, 23 Jun 2018 17:21:08 +0000

There have been talks of adding a GC to WASM for a long time, so there's hope yet