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c0mptonFP

235 karma · joined April 4, 2022

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c0mptonFP··on Write Like You Talk (2015)
Unrelated means two things are not related in any sense. Orthogonal means two things are unrelated with respect to a specific property.

Unrelated is more general, and less precise. Orthogonal restricts the "unrelatedness" to the specific property being discussed. It's also a very visual and intuitive word.

It's not only HN btw.

c0mptonFP··on Write Like You Talk (2015)
You hit the nail on the head, mostly.

> then you read the room and go with the layer of abstraction needed.

Finding the right layer of abstraction is orthogonal to the write-speak axis. When speaking to my colleagues, I use technical jargon that no layman could understand. None of the topics are simple, or strongly abstracted. The issue of write vs. speak is more about the sentence structure, sentence length, and breadth of vocabulary.

But I generally agree that carefully crafted written language can capture and transport thoughts much, MUCH more effectively.

c0mptonFP··on Ask HN: Is Anyone Else Tired of the Self Enforced Limits on AI Tech?
The sole purpose of guns is to harm/kill. Not comparable to ML.
c0mptonFP··on 'People were sucked into schemes': Inside Molly White’s campaign against crypto
AFAICS the edit history goes back to May 2022, however the site has existed long before that.

Not convinced

c0mptonFP··on 'People were sucked into schemes': Inside Molly White’s campaign against crypto
She's doing everything in her power to become famous/viral.

Look at the amount of work she puts into SEO and her own Wikipedia page. She's a Wikipedia editor that edits her own page. Can't get more self-absorbed than that.

c0mptonFP··on Wait vs. Interrupt Culture
Could you tell me more about your experiences with effective waiting culture?

I'm having a hard time believing that a e.g. a high-level manager/exec with 20 meetings per day, and a 60 hour work week is able to be on time with a purely waiting approach.

There are so many people that you need to align with this culture. If it worked for you, wherever you are, I respect that a lot.

c0mptonFP··on DevOps is broken
A developer who doesn't have a holistic view on their systems is a liability.
c0mptonFP··on Wait vs. Interrupt Culture
Ok, next time an engineer on my team can't stop himself from talking about his SIMD lock-free distributed queue, I'll just keep listening. Maybe I get to sleep in the office too.
c0mptonFP··on Wait vs. Interrupt Culture
Without interruptions, I would not be able to finish meetings on time. EVER.

Information exchange is always the bottleneck in larger organizations, so efficiency of meetings is really important.

I will interrupt someone if I understood their point, and we have different, more pressing items on the agenda. It's not a power play, not psychological warfare or bullying. I just want to get shit done on time.

c0mptonFP··on Inside the Proton
Neither do magnets.
c0mptonFP··on Chainalysis CTO said blockchain is easier to trace than paper money
You can have open ledgers without compromising anonymity, via ZK cryptography.
c0mptonFP··on Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel (2021)
I wish, brother. I wish it was more like that...
c0mptonFP··on Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel (2021)
It's popular because these war stories you find in blog posts are pure survivorship bias.

If I'd let every fucking team member go on an exploratory bug hunt whenever they feel like it (hint: that would be always) we would never get anything done.

What if they don't find anything? Is this issue really worth 2 weeks of dev time? That's 15k down the drain for a senior engineer, if not more.

c0mptonFP··on Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel (2021)
> We need more people and companies like this, who are willing to go beyond "oh it fails randomly sometimes" and track down the underlying issues.

I absolutely disagree. Most capable engineers I know have this urge to go down rabbit holes and fix any issue, this is nothing special.

Everyone wants to be the hero that found a bug deep in the stack, make a glorious pull request, and be celebrated in the community.

I much more value people who have enough self-control to pick meaningful battles, and follow the right priorities.

c0mptonFP··on Mle is a small, flexible, terminal-based text editor written in C
Because our main work environment is the shell..? Writing code in a terminal is seamless and fast, and it fits very well in a tmux workflow.
c0mptonFP··on Why read Dostoevsky? A programmer's perspective
> > From Communist Russia's collapse due to Marxism...

The delivery of this nonchalant line in particular made me cringe hard.

c0mptonFP··on Select * from cloud
Try starting a technology company called Apple, and tell me how that works out for you.

aCtUaLLy, aPpLes hAvE eXisTeD bEfoRe 1976

c0mptonFP··on How Underground Groups Use Stolen Identities and Deepfakes
One minor correction: mobile numbers are used for spam and bot prevention.

You can't have a discord or signal account without a valid phone number. Think about that for a second.

But yeah, not being able to use proper 2FA devices annoys the bejeesus out of me

c0mptonFP··on Closing a 30 pixel gap between native and web
> The problem: the web has a terrible UI toolkit for desktop apps. It has clickable links and basic forms, that's all

I think you're not giving credit to the best part about the web: CSS.

I've been programming GUIs with Java AWT, Swing, and Qt for years. Nothing comes close to CSS when it comes to defining layouts.

c0mptonFP··on 58 bytes of CSS to look great nearly everywhere
Line spacing is atrocious
c0mptonFP··on Are You Ready for the Internet? (1994) [video]
Gotta drink a verification can to enable it
c0mptonFP··on It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++
That's one of the thing that riles me up. The vast majority of programmers, especially in the open source community, don't take licensing seriously.
c0mptonFP··on What it takes to make a game by yourself
> keeping it playable is easily the most effective way of crafting a game because it enables you to routinely playtest and understand your progress.

Obviously.

> A key element of that is making the game legible and for that you do need to spend some time on “polish” because it’s an intractable element of the whole.

What does "legible" mean? Polishing means making something production-ready. A polished feature contains (ideally) no known bugs, has been thoroughly tested, gone through several UX iterations and brought up to a release standard.

That's not necessary for playtesting and improving the game. Unless you're done with all core game mechanics, you shouldn't be polishing.

c0mptonFP··on What it takes to make a game by yourself
> Polish as you go

Best way to end up bikeshedding.

c0mptonFP··on Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
Yup, better get rid of your GitHub account then as well
c0mptonFP··on Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
> but they absolutely adore figma that has never been anything but subscription.

Doesn't Figma have a free tier? That changes everything.

c0mptonFP··on Privacy vs. “I have nothing to hide” (2019)
You're reframing the desire for privacy as a dystopian paranoia. That doesn't do much good tbh
c0mptonFP··on Apache NetBeans 15
Are you by any chance running windows?
c0mptonFP··on When to use Bazel?
Being mindful of system library versions is deployment 101. They're dependencies after all.

Also, I do prefer to avoid dynamic linking altogether.

c0mptonFP··on A personal list of Rust grievances
I'm having a bit of trouble understanding a few points, maybe someone can help me out.

> Traits bias the Self parameter, which can make some multi-parameter traits rather odd.

Can someone show me an example? What does bias mean here?

> Type aliases are leaky, and can expose implementation details via definitional equality.

What is definitional equality? What does an abstract type alias look like?

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