This is definitely a big one.
The focus did use to be a lot more specific to startups with all the good and the bad that came with it. Things like a less negative view of "dark patterns" and more marketing related topics were definitely a part of a community back then.
Questions like "Should I be tracking as much data about my users as possible" would have been answered with "Yes, absolutely, the more data the better." much more often than you would ever see nowadays.
Some of this is a result of importing the culture-war mentality that destroyed Twitter, but some of it is not; see how often the word "disingenuous" gets posted, generally as an assertion that the parent commenter must be a liar because they couldn't possibly be so stupid as to believe what they wrote. That's pure native HN viciousness, not a Twitter import.
To understand the level of programming skill on Hacker News, consider that less than 5% of Hacker News readers succeed in adjusting a loop iteration variable to avoid unsigned overflow (despite repeatedly attempting to do so):
https://bugfix-66.com/8617f16fa68e021b656b1856f94afebf7a3117...
This is an empirical observation and not an attack (please don't flag/downvote this comment). It tells us something about the population of users on the forum, and where they are on the developmental timeline as programmers.
It seems like more senior programmers move on, maybe.
As I get further into my career, the signal to noise ratio is shifting quite a bit. I’ve seen many iterations of what’s being posted already, most of the comments aren’t novel, etc.
At this point HN is a habit. And a hard one to break.
A C programmer who understands a for loop should be able to fix this, despite the fact it's Go:
// We are generating n-1, n-2, ..., 1, 0
func below(n uint64, to chan uint64) {
for n--; n >= 0; n-- {
to <- n
}
close(to)
}
It told me I have an error ("what happens at zero") when i do:
func below(n uint64, to chan uint64) {
for n; n > 0; n-- {
to <- n-1
n--
}
close(to)
}
Note: I've been programming (including C and C++) for 3+ decades. I make mistakes all the time, but.... what exactly are you looking for here if my solution is not ruight?
EDIT: the pasted code is also incorrect, because I didn't complete converting the for loop into a while.
On my machine I used this code:
package main
import "fmt"
func below(n uint64 ) {
for n>0 {
fmt.Println(n-1)
n--
}
}
func main() {
below(10);
below(0);
}
func below(n uint64, to chan uint64) {
for n>0 {
to <- n-1
n--
}
close(to)
}
It doesn't know what's wrong in the code you submitted... it is not understanding deeply what's wrong with your code. It's not some huge multi-terabyte language model analyzing arbitrary code, or whatever.
It just knows your code is wrong and gives you a clue so you can try again.
Here is an example of what's running behind the scenes, to help you understand:
https://bugfix-66.com/contribute
The above code is what's being used for Bug #1:
https://bugfix-66.com/a6cb1e062ae0fdc47b43ec489aa40a958db728...
Is that pretty clear?
I'll tell you what's wrong with your code.
func below(n uint64, to chan uint64) {
for ; n >= 0; n-- {
var t = n - 1
to <- n
}
close(to)
}
func below(n int) {
for n--; n >= 0; n-- {
fmt.Println(n)
}
}
C:\git\bugfix66> go run .\bugfix66-2.go
3
2
1
0
Wait. Oh. Ok. I get it. It does have to do with the type signature.
(my real comment after I get some clarification from the bugfix site author is that I never, ever modify a variable in the initialization condition of a for loop, and i see that in the wild, I elide it.
As someone who has been reading and posting here regularly since 2009, here's what I'm finding: The further I get in my pursuits, the more my concerns and tribulations become specialized and weird. To get a useful answer from the public internet would require so much backstory and explanation that it's barely worth trying. And the answer would likely be wrong or not useful.
Instead real world social networks and specialized micro communities are where it's at. A lot of paid consultations as well. Pay a few hundred (or thousand) bucks to an expert and get the correct customized answer to a specific problem. Worth every penny compared to reading tea leaves off the wild internet.
But HN is still one of the highest signal broad communities out there so it's fun to stick around.
Any change that doesn't compile (bad syntax) or fails the tests is rejected. Code that produces deadlock or panic or timeout is also rejected.
If you give me an example of a rejected solution, I'll show you why the solution wrong.
1. No comparison to base rate. 5% shouldn’t make us believe they’re early in their journey. You haven’t given any observations about experience and the rate of error fixing.
2. Ignored sample bias. <5% of the users who submit to your site that you can track to HN solve the problem. That is very different from “<5% of HN readers”.
If anything, my downvote comment was too childish. I was put-off by their line about not downvoting because it was “empirical”. Seemed to insinuate anyone who disagreed was just going against the facts.
Edit: oh, didn’t realize I was replying to you again.
I've been programming for about 15-20 years, and using HN since 2007 or 2008 or so. I opened your site while reading the voxel thread, and was a little baffled about what I was encountering -- "why am I suddenly reading buggy go code? I thought this was an example of a spacial curve!" -- so, I went to check out your other posts to figure out what your deal is, and here we are.
I don't know Go, and I don't really want to "play a programming game" right now. Your code seemed a little obtuse and intimidating -- long bitmasks and combinations of xors and abstract names -- no thanks! There's a bug in there? How surprising!
I do lots of programming at work and in my spare time, and to a degree, I just can't be arsed when someone jumps out of the woodwork with "a bug" that it isn't going to mean anything to fix, so I moved on. I'm an experienced programmer who you likely aren't measuring.
So I saw your comment here, and my first thought was: well, that's a big (logic) bug in the reasoning of a person who made a game of fixing bugs! Kinda tasty irony, and totally fair game for the poster above to call out, in my opinion.
(anyway, after all this, I am a little bit more interested to go try out the above-mentioned challenge. It's a neat idea for a game, and you seem to have put a lot of work into it. Best of luck!)