an_d_rew

No idea, I have no affiliation with them at all.

If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say “evolutionary history”, because that’s almost always the case, in my experience.

Nordic’s Middleware is available under a standard BSD 3-clause license. https://www.nordicsemi.com/Software-and-tools/Development-To...

Their middleware and DRIVER library is first rate, also BSD: https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/nrfx/blob/master/LICE...

They are a first-tier active founding member and supporter of the Zephyr RTOS project by the Linux Foundation.

They’ve partnered with Segger for free use of Segger’s embedded studio for Nordic chips.

If a fraction of other companies did a fraction of THAT, Open Source would be soooo far ahead!

But you have to be careful about that word "independent".

There's a reason that things like 3D protein structure estimation, for example, are still very difficult problems, because none of the coordinates are even approximately independent of the others.

So you're back to a standard "minimization is really difficult" even in ultra-high dimensional spaces.

Wow, what a great write up – thank you, Jay!

I have seen this exact confusion with many friends and colleagues in the past who don’t understand just how different a micro controller is from an application processor, and what a difference it makes and even simple things (ha ha simple) like circuit board layout.

And application programmers are so used to things like virtual memory and thinking or hoping the system, never mind an application garbage collector, will manage memory that when you suddenly tell them their stack is limited to a few kilobytes and please please limit your heap usage, too they’re … Cast adrift!

> The Church. The lambda calculus. The gay agenda.

I just about lost it with that one. Started laughing so hard I woke up my wife...

> ... balancing a binary tree was an interview question which I personally bombed in 2010 ...

Thank you, Kyle. That first snippet gave me joy. That second snippet, though... that gave me _hope_.

Also, don't forget that C++ has _age_ behind it. Lots of places are still on arm-gcc-5 because heaven forbid you try to get a new compiler digesting an old code base, then get all stakeholders and customers onboard.

I dream of C++20. But my nightmares are all pre-C++14.

I have no affiliation with CloudFlare at all, but my interactions with them have all been kind, professional, and courteous.

I might recommend reaching out to the CEO, Matthew Prince, with a succinct explanation of your problem and I would be surprised if that by itself does not kick off some serious positive action!

> This, IMO, is the perfect way to do telemetry.

I understand @notRobot's sentiment, but do not agree with it.

If the default is "no telemetry", then very little telemetry will be collected.

This is an advantage to the user, but a strong DISadvantage to the collective, because the distro manager now cannot make informed decisions as to what packages are installed where and how often.

It really is a balance of "individuals vs the collective" and I don't think that answering both needs is simple, nor is it cut-and-dried.

> ... SquirrelMail ...

Oh thank you for that trip down memory lane! Ran my own SquirrelMail servers for years...

Hooray! Somebody who knows about the different capitalization rules between Québec and France!

There are dozens of us! Dozens! ;-)

> Young dev from large corp: "Sigh, ok, just saying in 2 years from now we wont be in a good spot".

Except in my experience it’s not two years, it’s two months. And I can set up two micro instances with terraform in less than an hour.

So soon you’re burning your three months of runway with development at 20-50% efficiency, and have no ability to pivot, if needed, because your infrastructure is rigid and hardcoded.

Neither scenario is “correct”, there is only “judgement”, and it can be devastatingly incorrect either way.

A lot of people with strong or extreme opinions (too little or too much tech debt) are inadvertently being fooled by “personal survivor bias“.

Absolutely.

I think it's easy for the HN crowd to inadvertently forget what computers / phones / tablets / TVs look like to ordinary people.

I would encourage people to come up with actual use-cases and pro-con scenarios rather than 100% "emotion mind" opinions.

I second the vote about “Eclipse” being toxic.

That is just my personal opinion, and I recognize that tastes differ, but due to years of (bad) experience across multiple domains for a plethora of reasons, I won’t allow and will actively root out any whiff of Eclipse near my codebase.

Yes, others have different options and IDE selection is only slightly less polarizing than politics or religion but... that’s the branding quagmire right there.

That was a great reply! Thank you, @BeetleB!

For me it is that numpy by default will use Intel’s Math Kernel Library for linear algebra, on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It will also use FFTW.

That alone makes it very, very worth it.

Only on HN does one discuss quantum entanglement and self-identify as a “layperson”... at the same time :-)

One thing to remember is the fear that surrounded the export of cryptographic technology from the US and ITAR and all the rest of it at the time. And then there was the whole key escrow fiasco with Lotus Notes.

So just be careful viewing the incident from 2020 with the purported benefit of decades of hindsight.

Disclaimer: I’m the guy who first found it and announced it at the rump session of the Crypto conference in Santa Barbara that year...

It is absolutely possible to write amazingly performant Java / JVM applications, and absolutely possible to write horrible blobby slow Go applications.

But given most of the standard corporate devs that I've worked with, it is infinitely easier to write crappy Java and not-bad Go than the other way around.

Sadly.

The sad thing is that, rather than forward this to the small "decision team" at work, where we can ponder the merits of the author's points...

... I'm going to just close my browser tab due to the puerile ranting at the beginning (and sprinkled throughout). A few good points, and perhaps a great basis for "proto4" or whatnot, but that my "OMG they're so dumb" ranting?

If that was a peer-reviewed paper, I'd have rejected it after reading the first paragraph, if I even made it that far. That's just not how you make a technical argument or win people over.

> I think a lot of people have forgotten what things were like in the early 90's.

Thank you for posting this.

“Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them.”

So I've contributed a couple of (tiny!) patches to Zephyr and wrote my own board support / devicetree setup for a custom Cortex-M4F setup that I designed.

Zephyr is awesome and the community is awesome, IMHO.

Using CLion to manage the CMake-based build is awesome.

What's not quite so awesome? The plethora of Kconfig items. Even with "make menuconfig" it can be very difficult to keep track of what you've configured in and what you've configured out.

For 90% of most projects, I'd expect the defaults to be sane. In fact, probably better than the ones an inexperienced dev would select.

But when you want that last 10%, it can be a real challenge.

I've had much more luck with Zephyr than I did with FreeRTOS or mbed (and I've used mbed a lot...)!

In addition to the other responses to this post I’ll add the following: I can easily claim a couple days of my time on a side project at work especially if I can show any kind of return for it. But put $10 on the company credit card?! Every month?! No freaking way! The layers of bureaucracy to get approval for such a monumental undertaking are just… Daunting…

Oh my God… “Java is a reasonable choice” and “liberally sprinkling in your code with the print statements is an effective debugging technique“...

Oh the pain... my everyday pain...

What a well written article! Thanks for taking the time to post it!

Months? Bah. Try years.

OMG Thank you!

I’ve only read the first quarter, but excellent job... the extreme clarity is hugely awesome!

“What goes in it” and “what does not go in it” thank you thank you thank you thank you!

Amen.

My experience, exactly.

As a Canadian – born citizen who just recently became a US permanent resident I would caution you on how “easy“ the Canada to US Route appears to be but may not actually be.

My permanent residency was super straightforward. My PhD is from a US institution. I have a long research career and a very long software development professional resume, and it still took three years.

Be aware that the TN work permit can have a serious downside: it’s so easy and simple and straightforward to get for Canadian citizens that many employers will stonewall or simply not consider going the green card route. That’s what happened to me many years ago even before the current immigration insanity, which will likely make things worse for you.

In general Canadians have to go to the H1 B route. It is vaguely possible to apply for a green card while under a TN work permit, but because of the way the rules are interpreted by USCIS, most immigration lawyers with experience in the matter strongly strongly strongly advise against it.

Nice.

Reminds me of discussing music piracy with my musician friends, all of whom fervently wanted to be sufficiently popular to actually HAVE people pirate their stuff!

(Not the piracy part, the "you really want people to listen to you, first" part...) :-)

> The land of the free, where the government decides what adults can with their own bodies.

I have found that such black-and-white sentiments are common here in the US, and surprisingly missing a lot of very importance nuance.

So... you will never use publicly funded (often emergency) healthcare? Do you really understand the risks that you are taking? Are you sure that the risks have been accurately and understandably explained? Are you sure that only adults will be targeted? Are you sure that commercial interests are not lying or exaggerating to you?

I remember analogous arguments in the late 70's / early 80's regarding the use of seat belts. "It's my body! I know the risks!"

It is the role of a functioning society to find a way to help protect its own members from non-obvious, long-term harm. We can argue if government regulation is the proper outlet, and we can argue about efficiency and details, but... no no sane world does a "I can damned well do whatever I want!" attitude build a safe, equitable society.