Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | gorgolo's commentslogin

I don’t mind the overall point of your argument, but it’s funny to see a claim that Americans have more reason to use Greco-Roman architecture than a Middle Eastern country. Classical Greek art actually took a lot of influence from the Middle East, and I believe Alexander actually reached te area around Afghanistan (and a Hellenistic kingdom existed there for a while), unlike America.


Well I wouldn’t argue Afghanistan is part of the Middle East culturally or geographically, but even if you did want to argue that, Alexander came and conquered that area for a little bit and then left. It wasn’t ever really culturally Greek.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Bactrian_Kingdom

But the main point isn’t whether afghanistan is Greek; it’s not of course. The main point is that it’s funny to hear an American argue that the US has more of a claim on Greek architecture than Afghanistan.


Python can work from the shell, if you don’t have external dependencies. But once you have external dependencies, with incompatible potential versions, I just don’t see how you could do this with “one environment”.


The “raw” and unedited photo can be just as or even more unrealistic than the edited one though.

Photographs can drop a lot of the perspective, feeling and colour you experience when you’re there. When you take a picture of a slope on a mountain for example (on a ski piste for example), it always looks much less impressive and steep on a phone camera. Same with colours. You can be watching an amazing scene in the mountains, but when you take a photo with most cameras, the colours are more dull, and it just looks flatter. If a filter enhances it and makes it feel as vibrant as the real life view, I’d argue you are making it more realistic.

The main message I get from OP’s post is precisely that there is no “real unfiltered / unedited image”, you’re always imperfectly capturing something your eyes see, but with a different balance of colours, different detector sensitivity to a real eye etc… and some degree of postprocessing is always required make it match what you see in real life.


I noticed this a lot when taking pictures in the mountains.

I used to have a high resolution phone camera from a cheaper phone and then later switched to an iPhone. The latter produced much nicer pictures, my old phone just produces very flat-looking pictures.

People say that the iPhone camera automatically edits the images to look better. And in a way I notice that too. But that’s the wrong way of looking at it; the more-edited picture from the iPhone actually corrresponds more to my perception when I’m actually looking at the scene. The white of the snow and glaciers and the deep blue sky really does look amazing in real life, and when my old phone captured it into a flat and disappointing looking photo with less postprocessing than an iPhone, it genuinely failed to capture what I can see with my eyes. And the more vibrant post processed colours of an iPhone really do look more like what I think I’m looking at.


I didn’t really understand the writer’s comments with exceptions and I don’t code in C++.

Their main complaint about exceptions seems to be that you can’t handle all of them and that you don’t know which you’ll get? If we compare this to python, what’s the difference here? It looks like it works the same here as in python; you catch and handle some exceptions, and others that you miss will crash your program (unless you catch the base class). Is there something special about C++ that makes it work differently, or would the author have similar problems with python?


"You can't handle all of them and you don't know which you'll get" is a great summary of the first two problems, and, this same problem also applies to Python. I'll add that these only start becoming an issue when you start adding more exceptions to your codebase, especially if those exceptions start appearing deep in a callstack and seemingly unrelated code starts needing to be aware of them/handle them.

The third problem (RAISI) is a C++ specific problem that Python doesn't have. Partly because in Python try/catch doesn't introduce a new scope and also partly because Python tends not to need a lot of RAII because of the nature of interpreted languages.

I found this video a fascinating take on comparing C++ to Python if you haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZxtaccqyWA


In normal use it's essentially the same yes. The one interesting edge case that might catch some people out is there's actually nothing special about std::exception, you can throw anything, "throw 123;" is valid and would skip any std::exception handlers - but you can also just catch anything with a "catch (...)".


> would the author have similar problems with python?

I would expect yes. It is true, that in a lot of modern languages you need to live with that dynamism. But to people used to C, not knowing that the error handling is exhaustive, feels deeply uncomfortable.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: