davidwf

This article was really great, and this gem stood out to me:

> When the hypothesis failed, we again rushed to move on with another work. We didn’t take the time to analyze why our theory was wrong. We didn’t question the experiment’s validity, which would have led us to realize our patch was wrong early on.

I've read dozens of postmortems where "someone did something to 'prove' that X wasn't the cause, but after ruling everything else out the team eventually realised that X was in fact the cause.", with 'X' being everything from "this patch can't have caused that behavior" to "I know it's not the kernel update because how could that have changed anything?"

In the face of a crisis, if you are in charge you really have to take all the "facts" you are presented with as being contingent on the level of panic that the presenter is feeling -- being a great engineer is more or less orthogonal to calm under pressure.

Our son at ~8 months had managed to get his leg in between the slats in the crib past his knee. I agree with OP -- this was instantly distinguishable from a normal "pick me up" cry.

I write a lot of Python and didn't know about this despite it being a 2015 blog post! The real kicker for me is:

* [ExitStack] easily scales up to many resources (including a dynamic number that's acquired in a loop)

Sure they can! However, in this particular instance, I was simply pointing out that, in contrast to the OP's statement that "any possible answer is a conspiracy theory.", there is a possible narrative where a group of society's elites can indeed be participating in the protests not because of some hidden motive, but instead because their own values genuinely align with those of other, non-elite protesters.

There are certainly also conspiracy theory narratives that can fit the situation if one is so inclined that way. :-)

I don't think that there's a conspiracy in any way!

The way that I interpreted this article and how it fits into the current moment is that there's a substantial portion of those dissatisfied with the current political order of permanent minority rule by people who have substantially different values from themselves who could be considered part of the "elite" of society in terms of wealth and influence.

That's not to say that there's a conspiracy theory! Coastal elites are certainly not the only people protesting, not everyone that's elite is dissatisfied with the current order, etc., etc. But IMO the current situation can be characterized as one where a large group of people, including but not in any way limited to a portion of society's "elite" grouping, are attempting to overturn the political order to better suit their values.

I've found two important self-reinforcing principles to be more important than the details:

* Don't let bare files exist at the "top level" (~), have a limited number of buckets * All new stuff goes into an inbox (pragmatically, ~/Downloads) and gets REGULARLY moved over

Putting all the stuff from Downloads into folders takes <10 minutes if you do it once a week!

For me, the different buckets end up as either "browseable" or "searchable". For example, ~/ebooks is pretty sensibly organised into programming, fiction, etc., and all the files have human names, whereas I have a "statements/receipts/leases" bucket that's just a big bucket of junk that will hopefully pop up in search if I ever need it.

You mean like the microscopic bacteria keeping our teeth healthy described by the article? :-)

Great article! I've found myself going through the same cycle of getting something working in the REPL and then regretting not having tests some time in the future several times!

In my experience much of the value of unit tests comes from "proofs of correctness", which REPL-driven development also provides! But unit tests also provide a lot of value in making confidence in changes, and knowing that the behaviour your verified in your REPL stays correct weeks and months later.

FYI I think Redwood is trying hard to be Rails for TS/Node...

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22537944)

"Banned" may not be the right word, but I do agree it's the wrong question. Story points and velocity measurements are about giving a reasonable guess about what's "likely" to be completed at any given point in time in the future, with bigger error bars the further out you look. Agile projects don't "complete" so much as a decision is made to release at a given point, and everyone is happier with agile in an environment where there's an expectation of multiple, continuous releases.

Fascinating to see "systems programming" in Guile -- anyone actually using this for real work?

Not consensus, but here's a counterpoint to all the folks implying "spend a year learning emacs". I made a failed run on "Practical Common Lisp" twice because I also tried to learn emacs at the same time, partially because of commment threads like this. I eventually went with Atom (my normal text editor) and atom-slime, and had a happy experience.

Maybe you would be shunned if you showed up at a professional CL shop for using such a setup, but if you are just wanting to try out CL for personal learning don't let emacs stop you.

I similarly have loved programming ever since I was a teenager, and had grown super-cynical about the whole enterprise until about a year ago, and now am 100% back in love. The biggest reason for this is shifting my focus from "programming as a job" to "programming as creative act", somewhat a la our gracious hosts article:

http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

In order to actually make that shift I personally was recommended the book "The Artist's Way" by Julia Cameron. If you are anything like me you may experience an intense aversion to something so "artsy", and I 100% understand. BUT I decided that since following that instinct had led me to what I thought was a dreary dead end of bad code forever, I should at least give it a chance, and it was indeed as effective as promised.

Joy is out there, don't lose hope, and good luck!

I wish I could highlight this a million times over. The idea of story points (which I have mixed feelings about regardless, but are not as bad as the author of the article mentions) is to produce a useful measure, which becomes instantly useless once it becomes a target. Once you start saying that you have to meet a certain velocity, you've gone off the rails.