callc

> quirks, issues, tricks, hacks and wasted life

This is a very important point if the tool is used by millions of people. All you need to do is waste a few 10s of seconds with some weird quirk that doesn’t act as expected, and BAM, collectively easily a year of human life was wasted.

Avoid surprising behavior.

Absolutely! Organization is extremely important!

Didn’t know about these, thanks for sharing!

I love python, have used it for years. I hate the dependency and multiple interpreter situation.

A great PL should stand on its own without the need for external tooling.

At this point I have given up on python except for if it’s a little script that only uses standard libraries. Otherwise I’m choosing a compiled language.

Some more thoughts: http://calvinlc.com/p/2025/06/10/thank-you-and-goodbye-pytho...

> Having root access is not in the interest OR benefit of most regular users.

What about desktop OSes for the last 40/50 years?

Sure they aren’t the foam-padded locked down phone OSes, but isn’t this fear a case of leaving said padded room?

It’s a psychological problem. Going from $0 to $1 is a mountain.

Starting a product or service at $30 / month sets expectations up front (no ad supported free tier)

This is an incompatible strategy with venture backed “get all the market share possible by offering services for free to crush competitors so we can have a monopoly to exploit later” mindset

Getting distracted at random times during the day _is_ fatiguing. Try putting phone away in another room when focusing on something, focus without distraction is a super power!

My immediate reaction is “absolutely not”. Unless the healthcare provider is willing to accept liability for the output and recommendations of their LLM. Are they willing to put their money to where their mouth is? Or are they just trying to reduce cost, increase profit?

Then I think, if you don’t have access to good healthcare, need to wait weeks or months to get anywhere, or healthcare is extremely expensive, then LLM may be a good option, even with chance for bad (possibly deadly) advice.

If there are any doctors here, would love to hear your opinion.

“Think different”

Joking aside, “design” clearly supplanting ease of use

Semi-related, parking your company name on widely used words in the dictionary like “Apple” and “Meta” really irks me.

Let’s just start some companies with the names:

- Let’s - Just - Start

You get the idea…

Source? A quick googling shows from https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/fatal-car-a... deaths per 100k pop in 2022:

- Mississippi 23.9 (highest)

- Texas 14.7

- CA 11.3

- Rhode Island and DC 4.8 (lowest)

Anecdotally, the huge trucks and driving culture (aggressive, fast) would have made me guess Texas has higher deaths before seeing the data.

Oh yeah, I didn’t even notice. Much worse than I thought!

Imagine explaining these rules to a beginner learning programming.

I find both the golang uppercase lowercase naming scheme and python underscores for private (and __ for *extra* private) to be terrible design choices.

They are hidden functionality, a set of rules which must be remembered. “Make sure to do <weird trick> because that mean <X> in <PL>”

Leave identifier names alone. Packing extra info inside is unnecessary mental burden

It’s amazing how small text and images, even compressed video, can get compared to uncompressed video.

Caring a little bit will help save a bunch of space.

That sounds more like a case against a highly ossified waterfall development process than anything.

I would argue it’s a good thing to replace the actual brainless activities.

True. It would benefit society to come up with a new framework of thinking about widespread forces on society enabled by tech. It’s not something we’ve needed to deal with in the past. And it’s clear that so much harm can be done.

Zuckerberg profits by replacing normal human social interaction with ad-infested parasitic addictive pseudo-socialization that drives a sobering % of the population to worse mental states

It seems like the underlying issue is trust.competent programmer - even a junior - and trust them to finish the task correctly. It might take multiple tries, and they may ask for clarification, but since they’re human, we trust they are intelligent.

There are some people who fall into the bucket that we can’t trust them to finish the task correctly, or within a time frame or level of effort on our part to make the task offloading exercise have a positive benefit.

If we view LLMs in the same light, IMO currently they fall into “not trust” category to really give they a task and trust them to finish it correctly, with us being confident we don’t really need to understand their implementation.

If one day LLMs or some other solution reaches that point, then it definitely won’t look like a bubble, but a real revolution.

We should adopt the term “tabular programmers” or “tabular engineers”!

> It's education now, but it will be lawyers and judges next

It already is this. Their attack on the judicial branch is the most frightening IMO, since it is directly attacking checks and balances.

Thanks very much ziofill. Is this the same thing as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? Or is there something else similar for time and energy?

I might regret asking, but could you explain this? (At a physics 101 level)

> “I'm not sure why people on HN (of all places) are so divided regarding the perception of AI/ML.”

Everyone is a rational actor from their individual perspective. The people hyping AI, and the people dismissing the hype both have good reasons.

The is justification to see this new tech as ground breaking. There is justification to be weary about massive theft of data and dismissiveness of privacy.

First, acknowledge and respect that there are so many opinions on any issue. Take yourself out of the equation for a minute. Understand the other side. Really understand it.

Take a long walk in other people’s shoes.

After using Go for large and medium projects, with hundreds and < 10 people respectively, I’m left with a desire for a better language.

I enjoy the simplicity of Go, but the tradeoff of Go’s imposed limitations (concurrency model, no subtype polymorphism in place of parametric polymorphism, no methods on external types, etc) feel like strict limitations without much benefit. (Minus labels and gotos, that’s great design)

The speed I don’t care about

The model of loose global functions for fundamental operations on built in data types is poor design. append(), delete(), close(), etc. How about make these methods on their respective types?

Overall coding in Go feels like coding in a pre-alpha language. Syntax-wise, not the top notch tooling and packaging.

I’ve been running on Wayland with nvidia drivers for around a year. No issues for development work. Haven’t tried gaming.

Turtles all the way down. Can you trust your compiler?

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

I’m curious, what has made Uber feel safe for you in terms of racism?

And also did you have a problem with AirBnB based on skin color?

They should be punished, the same as every other company that does this.

Chaebol?

I might not have explained my position adequately. I am not commenting on how Google became immensely successful, but just looking at it today in its current state.

It seems like the end result of unchecked capitalism is monopolistic practices. Companies want to make as much $$$ as possible. The most effective way to do that is to become a monopoly and avoid/destroy/inhibit any amount of competition as possible.

I really see it as an unstable system. Which is why we need society to put laws in place to keep the system in check, so it doesn’t turn sour.

Basically there’s a “healthiness” scale of capitalism. I want healthy capitalism.