brass9's comments

brass9 | 1 year ago | on: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

The GUI apps built with fyne framework are, at best, toy projects. I am not convinced go is a robust solution for building native GUI interfaces.

> Reason 1: Go can do basically anything That is a weak argument. All languages can do everything (for example, you can build GUI desktop apps in PHP). If omnipotency is the main criteria, then C# or Java are better alternatives than go - you can even build an OS on CLR/JVM.

brass9 | 8 years ago | on: Lazarus – A Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

> [x] Readable, somewhat python-like syntax

I have a rather different opinion on OP that it has a needlessly verbose syntax.

Pythonic it is definitely not. Even C# (which is another creation of Anders Hejlsberg, after MS poached him from Borland) has a better, readable and concise syntax.

I used to be a Delphi evangelist in it's glory days. Now I bristle when I read Pascal source code, there's so much unnecessary visual noise. Of course if your brain is habituated enough to parse Pascal code, eventually you will tend to filter out the begin..end's.

Pascal syntax belongs to C family of language.

As regards to Python-like syntax, I think you are referring to the Nim language, whose syntax happens to be similar to that of Pascal.

brass9 | 8 years ago | on: Want to Be Happy? Buy More Takeout and Hire a Maid, Study Suggests

I don't really understand the fascination of westerner's about a weirdo through and through...

In a world that epitomizes heinous men like Columbus or Alexander, it comes as no surprise that a racist, kinky pervert like MK Gandhi is hailed as peacemaker...

His `ahimsa` nonsense benefited the British raaj more than the Indian subcontinent. Because of his stubborn refusal to support forceful eviction of the imperial forces, independence had been delayed by a decade. Thousands of young men had been killed. Their blood is on Gandhis hands. Not to mention, during WW2 he sent Indian forces to reinforce the ailing British army.

During the 1899 2nd Anglo-Boer war, Gandhi volunteered for the British army. He preached independence, except for Black people. He expressed his disdain for Black Africans, by frequently referring to them as "Kafirs".

In 1930, he raised Rs 1.32 Crores - a humongous sum in those days (even in present day India that's a substantial amount of money) for the Dalits of India. No records yet exist that a single penny of that fortune had been spent for the betterment of the people. Not very surprising for a failed lawyer, who tried his luck abroad and decided to work as legal counsel for a wealthy Muslim smuggler in South Africa charging hefty fees.

People extol his vow to celibacy... and forget to mention, that he would separate married women from their husbands, and lie with them naked. He'd advise the husbands to take a cold shower whenever they felt aroused, while he was lying naked with their nude wives in the same room. He'd even lie naked with nude teen/pre-teen girls. When in Bengal, used the Bengali Muslims as an excuse to sleep naked with his 18 yr old grand-niece. He was 77 then, arguing that muslims may kill them, they should remain in the state of purity in case death comes. So he forced his grand-niece to sleep naked with him.

Though there's no account of Gandhi ever having sexual relationship with any of these women. Lying naked with nude women was his way to demonstrate his resolve... the "vow of celibacy"... Of course, it should be easy to refrain from heterosexual romp with all the nude girls and ladies lying with him in the same room... someone who was decades later found to be a closet homosexual...

Imagine if Mahatma Gandhi was alive today, and indulged in the weird activities that he did...

brass9 | 8 years ago | on: Want to Be Happy? Buy More Takeout and Hire a Maid, Study Suggests

> 4. My home cooked food ... costs less

Not really, if you consider the time and effort needed to prepare a meal at home. Starting from shopping at a kitchen market, transporting the goods to home, cutting, prepping, the cooking and finally cleaning up afterwards...

Unless you have several hours of free time each day, preparing ones own meal is not something everyone looks forward to...

brass9 | 10 years ago | on: The cult of genius?

> He wore a vest summer and winter, and never learned to bathe regularly.

I am curious as to why so many geeky/nerdy type guys express disinclination to daily bathing (myself included).

While regular bathing is beneficial to maintaining hygiene and health, too frequent bathing (especially when using cleansing products) can disrupt the skins natural sebum, pH & moisture control mechanism, dislodge the natural bacterial flora which may predispose the person to harmful infections. Many chemical products commonly used during bathing (soaps, shampoos, gels, disinfectants) are known to mess with the human immune & endocrine systems, a few may even be carcinogenic. Afflictions like eczema, asthma etc. are allegedly attributable to a heightened state of "hygiene" among modern humans - the immune system which keeps constant vigil against infections, is rendered "jobless" because the chemical disinfectants have done it's job, eventually attacks the body itself.

Spurred by the aggressive marketing from the personal cleansing products manufacturers, daily bathing has become a cultural phenomena in our society. Prime motivation for daily bathing seems to be grooming these days.

Anecdote does not equal evidence, but I've encountered many geeks who are inclined to hold off having a bath until it becomes necessary. I wonder why that is?

An interesting read: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/fashion/31Unwashed.html?_r...

brass9 | 11 years ago | on: War in the womb

This is faulty reasoning. To think that the female reproductive system developed prior to the fetus (in order to pave way for nurturing of the embryo) is implying evolution is a purpose-driven, goal-oriented process - a line of reasoning not too far from "intelligent design".

Not to mention the egg-chicken dichotomy is absurd. There was neither a "first chicken" nor a "first egg".

Single celled protists first developed sexual reproduction about 2 billion years ago as a means of producing genetically variable offsprings. It may be assumed both the offspring and the reproductive machinery of the parents developed concomitantly as life was making a shift from uni-cellularity toward multi-cellularity.

As for mammals (which includes us humans), the placenta, which serves as an important barrier between the mother and the fetus (only letting nutrition pass through), is of viral origin. Placental syncytiotrophoblasts SCT-1, SCT-2 proteins are derived from endogenous retroviruses. Our genome is full of fossils of viral DNA - accumulated over several millions of years. If these viruses had not apt-get install-ed biological chroot jails, we would not have been born at all.. (obviously some other modes of reproduction may have been developed)

Carl Zimmer has some interesting write-ups on this topic:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2012/02/14/mammals-ma...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/science/12paleo.html

For those interested in evolution of sexual reproduction and "viro-biome", I recommend Carl Zimmer's Planet of Viruses and Matt Ridley's Red Queen.

I agree the article is a bit sensationalist. Look at it in this way: had it been a boring, academic, science-journaly piece, many of us wouldn't have waded through the article at all... Obviously the target audience for that article (and the site) are general science-buffs and not only embryologists or molecular biologists. Personally I think some dramatisation (to make the content more appealing to general audience) is acceptable - so long as the subject matter doesn't deviate too much from reality.

PS: apologies for my broken english :)

PPS: Re: the chicken & egg question - the egg came first because reptilians laid eggs. Chickens, and birds in general, are descendants of dinosaurs.

brass9 | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

> Define rarely? What about Webkit, LLVM, and CUPS? These were already established opensource technologies. Apple has improved these technologies. But LLVM, Webkit or CUPS would exist even if there was no Apple.

brass9 | 12 years ago | on: Manager.io – Free accounting software for small businesses

A nice piece of work!

But I'm curious about a few architectural decisions. What made you to decide to build each HTML page by hand?

Code like this[1] makes my eyes bleed... reminds me of the faux-OOP HTML builder classes that used to be a fad among PHP programmers (or ISAPI & Delphi web developers of old) a while ago.. No offence, but much of your Manager.HttpHandlers.* codebase feels like messy, ugly PHP4 code ported to C#...

What made you decide against template-based output rendering (Razor, NVelocity, NHaml, .liquid to name a few)? With template-generated output, the business logic layer could be decoupled from the UI. I had only a cursory glance at your code (and thus could be wrong), but it seems manager.io's DAL/BLL layer is intermingled within the GUI parts.

The protobuf DLL was named protobufnet.dll in the MSI. But the proper filename should be protobuf-net.dll

I think user input validation and error handling could be made more robust.

Additionally, spawning 5 HTTP worker threads to serve a single user seems a little overkill.

These are few of the issues I've noticed during the 5 minute tinkering with your assemblies. But don't let this critique discourage you. The app looks good - I guess end users won't care how it's built so long as it provides real value...

PS: Thanks for the heads up about Eto forms! I'll give it a spin and see how it fares against Xamarin's XWT.

[1] https://gist.github.com/anonymous/7003337

brass9 | 12 years ago | on: JetBrains releases open-source Python IDE

>I'd use the system java/browser which has an extension available, no need to scan. System java? Which OS (barring Oracle Linux) ships with JRE pre-installed? Browser extension for Java? I assume your familiarity about the Java ecosystem has not been updated since HotJava (or whatever it was called).
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