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8589934591on Ask HN: Java for New Projects?

What do you recommend to switch from Python to Java or JVM based languages like Scala? I have developer experience with personal projects, but I can't seem to get shortlisted to any of the bigger companies which use them.

8589934591on Ask HN: Java for New Projects?

No matter what I try, I can't get python to reach the top. :D

I like the website. It shows rust for a lot of options go as close to next best.

8589934591on Show HN: Paisa – Open-Source Personal Finance Manager

I'm a longtime user of gnucash and this is a great product to convince me to move to ledger/hledger.

Question for author - Is it mostly a reporting tool or does it work similar to h/ledger where I can input my transactions from paisa?

Question for HN users - have you found ledger to be easier to use compared to gnucash? My challenges have been my lack or ease of understanding on how to input transactions in ledger and also getting good reports comparable to gnucash. It's highly likely I'm unaware of how to use the tool properly but I am not sure where to learn this.

8589934591on Four Lectures on Standard ML (1989) [pdf]

Can you suggest some course(s) and/or language(s)?

8589934591on WTFPython: Exploring and understanding Python through surprising snippets

I'd say requiring types enables faster onboarding and development for new developers than catching bugs. Bugs can only be caught to a certain extent. But figuring out what a each variable is and what they signify when passing them around a large codebase, it becomes essential and helpful to type the code. Pair this with a good IDE/editor, your development is pretty fast.

8589934591on WTFPython: Exploring and understanding Python through surprising snippets

Afaik racket can do all of what you have mentioned. I have run a few slightly non trivial dev systems using it with good success. Ofc, company never knew about it.

8589934591on WTFPython: Exploring and understanding Python through surprising snippets

I haven't tested out the repo with type hints so I can't comment on that. What I did mean to say was outside of this repo, type hints are a huge boon saver. There are enough legacy projects written by non python experts which would benefit from whatever I said above.

8589934591on WTFPython: Exploring and understanding Python through surprising snippets

There are both merits and demerits to python. Unfortunately not everyone has the opportunity or the luxury to work with projects that are properly maintained. Even messy python projects in legacy companies hold up but that does not mean quality and maintenance costs are good. My beliefs stem from my experience with the jobs available in my area and country. I'm not the expert on type safety but my understanding from various sources and my own experience is that type safety is superior. Go has been the best candidate as the alternative for the projects I have undertaken. YMMV.

8589934591on WTFPython: Exploring and understanding Python through surprising snippets

Wow. Can't believe a couple of these are in my production. Esp with the mixture of py2 and py3. And people who are not well versed in python are just not aware of these gotchas.

Good repo, I learnt quite a few more... wtfs. :)

I have a strong belief that unless type hints, testing, tooling is leveraged properly, python does not qualify as a good candidate for long term projects. Go handles all of this automatically and I'm having good results with it as an alternative to Python for small to medium scale projects.

8589934591on Ask HN: I'd like to start reading the Linux source code. Where should I start?

> XinuOS

Did you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinuos or https://www.amazon.in/Operating-System-Design-Approach-Secon... ?

8589934591on Writing Python like it's Rust

Could you elaborate your statement? How? My experience says otherwise. I am interested to know your viewpoint and experience.

8589934591on Writing Python like it's Rust

Out of genuine curiousity, what do you consider as serious production software? C C++ would probably help in embedded but I highly doubt they are used in every other domains.

8589934591on Writing Python like it's Rust

Typically, the selection of a programming language is predetermined in brownfield projects, leaving little room for choosing the "ideal" programming language for migration unless it is absolutely necessary (go can be a suitable option for migrations).

Code, like the one provided by the OP, should be valued and encouraged to prevent future bugs. Incorporating tools like Mypy during pre-commit and pyright during code editing can make a significant difference. This approach helps eliminate the need for writing unnecessary unit tests that check for None type.

In my opinion, as a mid-senior developer, I always appreciate the use of types in Python. If you are confident about having predictable inputs, you can rely on duck typing and use it primarily for scripting purposes.

8589934591on Please delete 2M files to continue using your Google Drive account

https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/39666358/deleting...

This might probably help. Search by largest attachments and delete so you have some buffer space. Then you can select individual emails/emails per sender and delete them all.

8589934591on Show HN: Great Books Homeschool beta program

Your product is great. I do have a pain with the price point. I live outside the US and it's simply expensive.

Maybe consider regional pricing? If you include this and region specific books as well, your service will be golden.

Btw, what stops someone from paying for just a month or two and collating all your plans and then use it for the rest of their lives without paying you anymore? I mean this genuinely and not with ill intent.

Regarding pricing, I'd be happy to pay an amount as one time purchase for the entire curriculum vs a subscription model. Or pay one time for each bundle/grade. Just some ideas.

8589934591on Ask HN: Is Hacker News slow for anyone else?

Yes and reddit is down as well. Came to hn to check that.

8589934591on Ask HN: What's stopping you from blogging?

Just don't find the time. I use emacs as my editor and it's slighty limiting where I can write my thoughts quickly.

8589934591on Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)

I have an idea for a very minor side project. Create a static site generator template which will generate each site I follow as its own section and run it on github actions everyday to fetch newer feeds and publish as a website. This way I can access on my phone and don't have to worry about syncing the feeds regularly.

I use elfeed as my rss and even though I sit at my system for quite long, some days I just would like to go through my feeds on my phone. I would also love to have an archived portable copy of all my sites as well (FOMO) which currently elfeed doesn't seem to support exporting the feeds right now.

8589934591on Solarized

I use atom light. I find it the best light theme so far.

8589934591on Glassdoor not so anonymous

I do the same as you, check for lower ratings to be informed. I have found it helps if I talk to current/ex employees on linkedin. So far that has been transparent and helpful. The usual 5 stars are just generic "awesome team/great culture" which is useless.

I have left both 5 star and 1 star reviews. Unfortunately some of my 1 stars have been removed. I leave 5 stars when it's good (ignoring any usual corporate politics that might exist, these exist anywhere regardless). My 5 stars are usually descriptive enough to make it authentic and not like "good place to work, friendly ppl, awesome culture". I leave 1 star when things get really bad, like really unethical backstabbing sort of bad.

But then again I don't understand how companies are able to get them removed off of glassdoor. Like, my current company has done everything from removing reviews to having good publicity on glassdoor/linkedin/any social media but they have not tackled one single negative review head on to change their culture. Lol.

8589934591on How to Design Programs

If anyone wants a faster paced version of the book or the edx course, here's a link to one of the authors' website having videos and problems/solutions. I have found this to be helpful to share with devs who have experience but would like to revisit fundamentals.

https://www.cs.utah.edu/~mflatt/htdp-lite/

https://my.eng.utah.edu/~cs5510/htdp-videos.html

Here's another course which I have used to train interns. It's faster paced and useful for people who learn and progress at a faster pace.

https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~cs1102/a16/index.html

Here's another version of the same/similar where the assignments are challenging enough. You can do them in either racket or pyret.

https://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs019/2018/assignments.html

8589934591on Glassdoor not so anonymous

My current company had around 20 or so negative reviews bringing the ratings down to 2. We had a new HR head come in and asked employees to rate 5 stars. Poof. 16 of the negative reviews have vanished. They're now replaced with 5 star reviews. We're currently at 3. HR's goal is to bring it up to 4.

I definitely don't trust glassdoor. :(

8589934591on I’m switching from VS Code to VS Codium

As another poster here, I would love to help contribute to emacs. What would I need to learn and where would I start?

8589934591on Lessons learned from running Apache Airflow at scale

I agree with this. The slack is just the core developers discussing further development and tickets. The documentation is lacking big time. The only response to this is to raise PRs to improve docs.

8589934591on Lessons learned from running Apache Airflow at scale

I echo other comments. Running and managing Airflow beyond simple jobs is complicated. But then if you are running and managing Airflow for simpler jobs, then you might not need Airflow.

One data center company that I know of uses airflow at scale with docker and k8s. They have a huge team of devops just to manage the orchestrator. They in turn have to fine tune the orchestrator to run smoothly and efficiently. Similar to what shopify has noted here, they have built on top of and extended airflow to take care of pain points like point 4. For companies like this it makes sense to run airflow.

Another issue I see companies/engineers who adopt airflow is that they use it as a substitute for a script than as an orchestrator. For example, say you want to download files from an API, upload to s3, load it to your warehouse (say snowflake) and do some transformations to get your final table - instead of writing separate scripts for each step of fetch/upload/ingest/transform and call each step from the dag, they end up writing everything as a task in a dag. A huge disadvantage is there is a lot of code duplication. If you had a script as a CLI, all your dag/task has to do is call the script with the respective args. I agree that airflow comes with a lot of convenience wrappers to create tasks for many things but I feel this results in losing flexibility.

This also results in them tying their workflow with airflow and any change they might need they have to modify their airflow code directly. If you want to modify how/what you upload to s3, you end up writing/modifying python functions in the respective dags' code. This removes the flexibility to modify/substitute any component of the workflow with something else or even change the orchestrator from airflow to something else. Additionally, different teams might write workflows in different ways - standardization of practice is really hard. This in turn results in pouring more investments to maintaining and hiring "airflow data engineers". Companies fall into steep tech debts.

Prefect/dagster are new orchestrators in town. I'm yet to try them out but I've heard mixed reviews about them.

EDIT: Forgot about upgrades. Lot of upgrades are breaking changes esp the recent change from 1->2. You end up spending a lot of time just trying to debug what went wrong. Just installing and running it is a pain.

8589934591on How to feel engaged at work: a software engineer's guide

In microsoft teams you can schedule "focus" time for a max of 4 hours. This acts like DnD and books your calendar. What I did was copy the same slots into 2 more 4 hour slots. So every day I'm busy for 12 hours with DnD. It does not go to the yellow status during that time. Win-win situation if you have shitty management :P

8589934591on The business case for fewer developers in meetings

OT related to standups, we now use https://www.dailybot.com/ and it has cut down on our meeting time across teams to quite an extent. The bot gives us daily checkins which records what we worked on the previous day, what we plan to work on today, what blockers we have. This has enabled us to identify blockers across teams and fix them as well as being productive and checking in whenever we feel like it. By EOD, everyone would have filled up the form/bot.

I'm not affiliated to the product.

8589934591on The business case for fewer developers in meetings

Although this my be specific to my org, meetings are an excuse for PMs and non tech to just "talk things out". No requirement comes in written form and no meetings are recorded in written form. This gives them a safe passage to modify the requirements as and when they see fit.

Apart from this, for meetings which are not recorded, they can/do always say that they didn't say something when they actually did and when caught red handed they get defensive and live in denial.

IMO, written communication helps people articulate it better and hold them accountable as well.

8589934591on Reversing Lens-Induced Myopia (2018)

Is it recommended to get two different pairs of glasses for both near sightedness and far sightedness? I have a -3.5D with astigmatism as well. I get the feeling I'd require only less powered glasses for screen time as opposed to using my regular glasses for it. What is your professional opinion about this?

8589934591on No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

I use this https://returnyoutubedislike.com/ . But from another comment it looks like these addons use their own database... It has helped me so far.

Apart from this if you want to turn off recommended videos and comments and hide your front page from displaying anything except the search bar, you can use the following filters on ublock origin. I have enabled/disabled according to my needs. I've included the source comment as well if you want to explore more.

I've noticed that I now only search what I need and that helps with my productivity.

  # https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21026069

  # this is for blocking home page thumbnails videos
  youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype='home']

  youtube.com##ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer
  youtube.com##app-drawer
  youtube.com##ytd-item-section-renderer.ytd-comments

  # side hamburger menu all details
  #youtube.com##ytd-guide-renderer

  # side home/subscription etc icons
  youtube.com##ytd-mini-guide-renderer

  youtube.com##ytd-topbar-menu-button-renderer
  youtube.com###buttons.ytd-masthead

  # hamburger menu
  #youtube.com##yt-icon-button

  youtube.com##.ytp-endscreen-content

  # https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24506515

  #    youtube.com##.ytp-suggestions
  #    youtube.com##.ytp-pause-overlay
  #    youtube.com##.videowall-endscreen
  #    youtube.com###related
  #    youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="home"]