charlieflowers

> "any sufficiently advanced agent is indistinguishable from a DSL."

I don't quite follow but I'd love to hear more about that.

Yeah, Go is probably the best general purpose language at the moment.

Rust is great, but there's no need to manage memory manually if you don't need to.

So for general mainstream languages, that leaves ... Python. Sure, it's ok but Go has strong typing from the start, not bolted on with warts.

(I realized how incredibly subjective this comment turned out to be after I had written it. Apologies if I omitted or slighted your fave. This is pretty much how I see it).

This reminds me of the old idea of the Lisp curse. The claim was that Lisp, with the power of homoiconic macros, would magnify the effectiveness of one strong engineer so much that they could build everything custom, ignoring prior art.

They would get amazing amounts done, but no one else could understand the internals because they were so uniquely shaped by the inner nuances of one mind.

I fear we (the USA) would rather have a puppet who will meet our oil demands than someone who wants to do what’s right for Venezuela.

"Ohh, time flows _that_ way for you."

Imagine how big of a stink the linter would put up as you worked on your most recent codebase!

Both the article's examples there are bogus -- yet in both cases the underlying points are true.

Google generates a lot of revenue per employee not because the employees are good (though many of them are of course), but because they own the front door to the web. And the Knight Capital story has many nuances left out by that summary.

In both cases the author needed a hard hitting but terse example. But as I said, both the claims are true, so in the voice of the courtroom judge, "I'll allow it."

I read the whole thing and I didn't see any waffle. Sure, undeniably some excess word count, some emotion in responding to critics. But no waffle.

The "is this cloud or not" debate in the piece makes perfect sense. Who cares whether Hetzner is defined as "the cloud" or not? The point is, he left AWS without going to Azure or some other obvious cloud vendor. He took a step towards more hands on management. And he saved a ton of money.

Yeah, these kinds of "orthogonal" things that you want to set up "on the outside" and then have affect the "inner" code (like allocators, "io" in this case, and maybe also presence/absence of GC, etc.) all seem to cry out for something like Lisp dynamic variables.

Not working for me fyi -- just spins.

Kevin Hart is what's left when you adjust 50 Cent for inflation.

I just got back from a family vacation there. I was tired that day, it was hot and crowded, and I started thinking, "I wonder if this will be worth it."

I found myself astounded, struck speechless, and moved to tears. I was in awe.

Gaudi is someone we software engineers should revere. He made things precisely and powerfully functional while also making them beautiful.

Do not miss seeing Sagrada Familia if you ever get the chance.

It seems you agree? I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. I had gotten the impression (second-hand) that they were roughly equally matched in this regard.

> "while C++ continues to dominate ... performance-critical domains"

Why performance-critical domains? Does C++ have a performance edge over Rust?

You just created a modern take on LMGTFY

Respectfully, I disagree, though maybe we haven’t yet articulated enough details to know exactly where we disagree.

I think underlying Kent’s statement is an observation that is undeniably true. The closer a test is to the actual way the software will be used, the better it is in a number of ways, _all else being equal_. All else is never fully equal, which is why everything is about tradeoffs.

But when a test aligns with how the software will be used, there are a whole bunch of synergies and benefits. Simplicity increases, clarity increases, you start getting multiple payoffs for each bit of effort you invest.

I’m sure people cargo cult it and lose track of the tradeoffs, like anything else, but there’s a solid point under there. And I agree with him, it is valuable enough to be called a “best practice.”

Good stuff!

The initial comments here surprise me. I’ve never seen such poor quality comments on such a good article on Hacker News. The article is top notch, highly recommend. It explains from first principles very clearly what the (a?) mechanism is behind model checking.

So is the ability to compute the entire state space and prove that liveness and/or safety properties hold the single main basis of model checker’s effectiveness? Or are there other fundamental capabilities as well?

I've often knocked Russia for continually choosing thugs to run their country (I know its more nuanced than that, but still).

And now America is doing essentially the same thing.

Hexagonal / ports and adapters / onion / functional core imperative shell all try to do this.

Just yesterday I bought some steaks that were $55 with the loyalty card and $130 (no typo) without.

I’ve never seen a difference that huge before.

I would click +1 million if it existed. Lol you had me reading seriously and taking notes up until the counting part.

If members of Congress can make millions trading on info they get from sitting on key committees, then trading based on your first hand experience certainly should be ok.

I thought you missed the GP's joke. Then I thought, wait, no, he made an even more subtle joke. :scratches-head:

I agree about cramming features across languages. Plus, Software dev is social. I only did this in code for myself.

That being said though, it actually fit really well in golang. Allowed functions that used to return ‘null, err’ to return an Either, which improved on all the downsides of returning null (if you return null your callers have to check for it).

It actually improved the ergonomics quite a bit. ‘Either’ fits nicely into golang, but I doubt it will become mainstream anytime soon.

`Either` works pretty well in Go. I implemented it and it felt reasonably close to Rust/Haskell (without `try!` of course).

Yes, of course, and a gun.

Or the flip of a coin?

I don’t know the answer but it’s an interesting question

Actually, if an llm could become good at propaganda, it could quickly come to rule the world. I never considered that angle before, but it’s legitimately scary.

UPDATE: Thought of a good clarifying analogy. In one of the sequels to “Enders Game” the brother and sister of Ender adopted anonymous online personas and began writing. They were so skilled at politics and propaganda that they disrupted the entire world and the brother soon became world leader.

I wonder if chatgpt will start “closing” questions as “not a good fit for its Q&A format,” or “too opinionated,” or “a duplicate” of something that is acutely unrelated.

Actually, this seems to be a case where chatgpt is smarter than the humans.