ducharmdev

I think it really depends on the language.

In languages that more easily support repl-driven development (e.g. Clojure), I think this is less of an issue. If you have a handful of pure functions, you can quickly and easily execute them via the repl, so you get a lot of clarity as to what those intermediate values look like even if the functions are ultimately used in a more point-free style.

But on the other hand, this would be a nightmare in C# (what I use in my day job). Sure, you can execute arbitrary expressions while debugging C#, but IMO you can't really achieve the same clarity. I'd rather see intermediate values like you suggest since it's easier while debugging, vs a bunch of nested function calls.

Ah that is slightly different. To me, Light of Other Days is very much a thought experiment into how humanity would deal with the complete eradication of privacy; while initially the technology is only in the hands of a few, eventually it is made accessible to virtually everyone.

It's less about some outside force surveiling (whether aliens or big corporations), and more about what happens when surveillance becomes a basic fact of life (e.g. why wear clothes if everyone can see you shower anyway?).

I also noticed that Liu cities Clarke as one of his inspirations according to Wikipedia, totally makes sense based on this thread.

Having not read any of Liu's works: how exactly is the idea of total surveillance a narrative innovation of Liu's?

I'm reminded of Arthur C Clarke's The Light of Other Days; that to me was total surveillance.

I'll be curious to see how viable Tauri Mobile is long-term, considering their recent alpha release.

And here I thought software developers were allergic to history

This really resonates with me; it makes me realize that I've been too caught up in the subjective things you list here, and not focusing enough on what's more objective.

This applies to conversations about performance a lot, too - so many debates on performance happen without any benchmarking or attempts to measure.

I guess I see it more as a broader economic problem than purely one of individual responsibility. Sure, bad design choices are made by individual teams that could be avoided, but at the same time our industry incentivizes the problems you describe.

Many developers are trying to get React experience on their resume to be more hireable; they do not care whether it's the best solution for the business, only that it adequately compensates them for labor that they can use to sustain their families.

With smaller organizations I think you can better control the motivations behind design solutions, but larger orgs can become a complete mess due to the politics (e.g. tech leadership encouraging all teams to use technology X, regardless of whether it makes sense for many situations). Collectively, these decisions and the resulting norms put pressure across the industry, encouraging certain behaviors and discouraging others.

It makes me wonder: what if the solutions you have in mind do exist out there, but simply as open source projects with zero eyeballs on them? What if there are dozens upon dozens of them, each solving a class of problems but in a slightly different way?

In terms of organizing work among huge groups of people, I don't think any of the above possibilities would be feasible for an industry. We already complain about having just a handful of frameworks to choose from.

What do you mean by this - do you have a specific example?

Writing a lot is important, but being able to get feedback on your writing can prevent you from developing bad habits you may not be aware of.

When I was in college for English, getting regular feedback from professors and the writing center helped me learn things I wouldn't have figured out on my own.

But of course, context matters: that was great for improving my general writing skills and my academic writing, but if you're doing creative writing, technical writing, etc., ideally you want feedback from people that are experts in the kind you're interested in.

I think it's interesting seeing your comment right above another where someone was moved to tears over how this affected them.

I'm reminded of ELIZA, an early chat bot:

> ELIZA's creator, Weizenbaum, regarded the program as a method to show the superficiality of communication between man and machine, but was surprised by the number of individuals who attributed human-like feelings to the computer program, including Weizenbaum's secretary.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.

Yup, you can. Also in Clojure, like this:

(< 1 2 3 4 5 6) => true

I had this same experience. I thought it sounded like an interesting idea, but in practice I didn't think it lived up to some of the hype it often gets on HN.

The holiday season wouldn't be complete without the HackerNews Humbug

Ideally all components would be small bite-size pieces, where scrolling down wouldn't be a big deal. But in practice I could still see it being tedious, scrolling through a bunch of classes to find the one you care about.

Now if there is a go-to-definition for CSS classes, that would be quite useful. But I appreciate that I don't have to even think about putting a name to my styles with Tailwind.

I really relate with your example here. Adding padding/margin is such a common task, it should be quick & easy.

I feel the same way - I absolutely love having vim keybindings & the command palette together. I prefer vim for editing text, and vscode's defaults for everything else.

Agreed on org mode. I'm more of a vim + vscode user, but I did try spacemacs once and org mode was a big take away for me.

For me it's the Twin Peaks soundtrack

That's super impressive. Have you been a runner in the past, like high school or college?

I'm starting this in my late twenties after a fairly inactive decade; hiking has been the only thing that's kept me active over the years.

This is all great advice; signing up for the 5k months in advance was a big motivation.

Running slow is probably the most significant bit though - I think new runners end up hating running because they're immediately starting at an unsustainable pace.

I went from completely sedentary, to running 5km 3 times a week. I managed to run my first 5k race this year too!

My goal for next year is to participate in a 10k race, as well as improve my 5k times.

In a weird way, I feel like Tumblr touches on something like the early internet; Tumblr has a distinct culture of curation that I've not seen in other platforms.

Behind every no code solution, is a SaaS company making bank off the belief that we don't need code... by writing code.

It's pretty easy to use some ML-as-a-Service platform, where you simply hit an endpoint in Azure, AWS, etc. without any prerequisite knowledge of the underlying models powering it.

Although asking someone to understand all the underlying math is a bit much, I think there's a middle ground here.

I come from the Bible belt, and was religious as a teenager before life circumstances led me to quickly and dramatically turn away from faith. When that curtain was pulled, suddenly many of the adults in my life seemed misguided at best, and downright evil at worst.

But college gave me a different view on this. I went to a small university, where some professors made a real effort to mentor students - not only to make them better academics, but better people too. These professors were people I really looked up to.

I think they empathized more with students, recognizing that while they did have advice to give, context matters - some may be relevant nowadays, some may not. They also were quite analytical; they'd only truly believe some advice they gave if they'd spent lots of time critiquing, testing, and thinking about it.

I guess I mention all this to say: respect for someone's advice must be earned. It sounds like your family did not earn this, so IMO you have the right idea.

If you have a base familiarity with the command line, I think many build tools do have great basic defaults, e.g. `dotnet run`, `cargo run`, `npm run dev`, etc. Vite is another example of good defaults in frontend dev; it allows you to sidestep a lot of the difficulty one may run into with webpack.

But I think you're right in many ways though. For seasoned devs, cli tools give a lot of flexibility and allow dev tasks to be automated in pipelines more easily, but it requires one to read documentation or use the help subcommand to discover what else you can do. Which is not a big deal when you are experienced, but I definitely remember struggling early on with things like that when I was self-teaching how to program.

Lots of .NET

Never been to Wick's but Danny Mac's is heaven