hamasho

Love `TOTALLY RIGHT` and `COMPLETELY WRONG` as boolean, but `TRUTH` and `FAKE NEWS` sounds better. Too much social media consumption makes me feel that "truth" or "fact" are kinda sarcastic.

It also reminds me TrumpScript: https://github.com/samshadwell/TrumpScript

  > Zig  for ( 0..9 ) |i| { }
  > C    for (i = 0; i < 9; i++) { }

I know an open interval [0..9) makes sense in many cases, but it's counterintuitive and I often forget whether it includes the last value or not. It's the same for python's range(0, 9).

  > Traditional search engines were built for humans. They rank URLs, assuming someone will click through and navigate to a page. The search engine's job ends at the link. The system optimizes for keywords searches, click-through rates, and page layouts designed for browsing - done in milliseconds and as cheaply as possible.
  > ... AI search has to solve a different problem: what tokens should go in an agent's context window to help it complete the task? We’re not ranking URLs for humans to click— we’re optimizing context and tokens for models to reason over.

I also want a search engine which ranks the results based on how it's useful to reason about, not how it can sell potential ads by invoking false rage or insecurities. And it would be better if unrelated information or fancy gimmicks are removed from the website like Reader View.

I like data lakes and their SQL-like query languages. They feel like an advanced version of the "Everything is a file" philosophy.

Under "Everything is a file", you can read or manipulate a wide variety of information via simple, open/read/write() APIs. Linux provides APIs to modify system settings via filesystem. Get the screen brightness setting? `cat /sys/class/backlight/device0/brightness`. Update? `echo 500 > /sys/class/backlight/device0/brightness`. No need for special APIs, just generic file operations and the kernel handles everything.

FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) provides even more flexibility by allowing user space programs to build their own drivers that handle any data operation via the filesystem. You can mount remote systems (via SSH) and google drive, and copying files is as easy as `cp /mnt/remote/data/origin /mnt/googledrive/data/`. Or using unique FUSE like pgfuse and redisfs, updating redis value by postgres DB data is just `cat /mnt/postgres/users/100/full_name > /mnt/redis/user_100_full_name`.

But filesystems are only good for hierarchical data while a lot of real world data is relational. Many FUSE software tries hard to represent inherently non-hierarchical data in a filesystem. Data lake allows to use SQL, the elegant abstraction for relational data, across different underlying data sources. They can be physically distant and have different structures. A lot of real world applications are just CRUD on relational data. You can accomplish much more much easier if those data are just a big single database.

  > I'm fairly pro-market, but I agree with this. I think people should do what they want if they don't harm themselves or others.

Is this still pro-market though? I have the same opinion and I often labeled as "anti-market" when I call regulations for gambling, social media, AI, etc.

Remind me this useful URL when boss says "we need carousel".

https://shouldiuseacarousel.com/

I know how important code quality is. But I can't (or don't have energy to) convince junior engineers and sometimes project managers to submit good quality code instead of vibe-coded garbage anymore.

It's super hard to have good faith discussions on the internet for years now. When someone has different opinions, those opinions are associated with certain groups (liberals, conservatives, etc). And it's very easy to demonize other groups, because social media shows curated content with extremely idiotic and malicious people in that group. Even if we have only slightly biased opinions, the algorithm knows watching content which follow your existing opinions are super engaging. We can't resist the satisfaction and dopamine hit of finding out our opinion is right. Attacking obviously wrong people from a moral high ground without risking being attacked by other people is also really attractive. After consuming such content for a long time, we come to see other groups as nothing but evil, and it makes it very difficult to have good faith conversations.

The problem with vibe coding is it demoralizes experienced software engineers. I'm developing a MVP with vibes and Claude Code and Codex output work in many cases for this relatively new project. But the quality of code is bad. There is already duplicated or unused logic, a lot of code is unnecessarily complex (especially React and JSX). And there's little PR reviews so that "we can keep velocity". I'm paying much less attention for quality now. After all, why bother when AI produce working code? I can't justify and don't have energy for deep-diving system design or dozens of nitpicking change requests. And it makes me more and more replaceable by LLM.

Funny how those three posts are in hacker news top 5 now. I guess today is the low level appreciation day.

  * The Linux Boot Process: From Power Button to Kernel
  * The Journey Before main()
  * How programs get run: ELF binaries (2015) (lwn.net)

edit: format

I wonder that's because a lot of news titles are clickbait. If they hallucinate the summary based on what the title may suggest, no wonder they misunderstand half of news articles.

I agree with the author. DSLs are often more reasonable, readable, and authentic than weirdly ported versions for general purpose languages. On the other hand, language servers checking type mismatches and providing suggestions are very useful. I too hope they will become good enough so we can use the same capacity for the DSL in a general purpose language like CSS/SQL in JavaScript. They are some, but not enough.

Off topic, but because the article mentioned improper usage of DOM, I put down the UK government's design system/accessibility. It's well documented, and I hope all governments have the same standard. I guess they paid a huge amount of money to consultants and vendors.

[1] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/radios/

Reminds me this: https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/9ljv3n/50_cent_in_ma...

With LLM and coding agent, it may be become possible to highlight core business logic, or other actually important information. Imagine reading 100 lines of Go function, and the core business logic is highlighted by blue, error handling is red, and IO related things like updating DB or external API calls in yellow.

The grid layout in spreadsheets works well for prototyping UI, but I also love there is no grid system in excalidraw. In other UI tool, I can't stop aligning every elements or it really bothers me. In excalidraw I can be satisfied with good-enough design. The same with other things like text size, or colors.

Every time YouTube has problems, I'm like "why YouTube doesn't try hard to work properly on my Firefox with uBlock origin, sponsorblock, and dozen of conflicted plugins? Are they stupid?"

I also had a very hard time to annotate types in python few years ago. A lot of popular python libraries like pandas, SQLAlchemy, django, and requests, are so flexible it's almost impossible to infer types automatically without parsing the entire code base. I tried several libraries for typing, often created by other people and not maintained well, but after painful experience it was clear our development was much faster without them while the type safety was not improved much at all.

I wonder how many of the cancer and heart disease reports are just about famous people who happened to die from those causes, rather than educational or awareness articles.

"It wasn't my intention. i3 works well with the default config, except the keybindings for moving are jkl; instead of hjkl, but I customized it extensively. I'm not an 'apple enthusiast' (I used Arch on Macbook btw). I know it lacks so many thing and it was frustrating. I'm not intended to criticize Linux; I've just gotten used to macOS.

My theory is that as more people compete, the top candidates become those who are best at gaming the system rather than actually being the best. Someone has probably studied this. My only evidence is job applications for GAFAM and Tinder tho.

I used to be a heavy user of i3. It's very flexible and configurable, and you can do much more than just moving windows. But after I switched to Mac, I couldn't find a tiling window manager that was both feature-rich and stable. After trying several options, I just use Rectangle[1]. It's not a window manager; it only provides shortcuts for window placements like simply moving windows to left/right/top/bottom or splitting the screen into 3/4/6 sections and place windows. It covers 80% of my needs and there are no pitfalls or unexpected behavior, so now I'm happily using it. Another reason is that I'm getting old and tired of using very flexible software with tons of custom configs.

[1] https://rectangleapp.com/

Honestly, I'm giving up hoping for even a fraction of deserved punishment too. It's hard to handle the emotional dissonance I feel repeatedly when I see injustice, so I've adjusted myself to expect minimal or no punishment and just hope things improve a little. I know this is exactly what those people who repeatedly do malicious things want to happen, and I'm not suggesting we give up seeking social justice. I just can't handle the rage I feel every time or I'll suffer from severe depression again. I need to save my willpower to still hope for a better world and to encourage or support people who are actually working to improve society.

I kinda feel Bitcoin hitting $100k does not mean its success. I think it proves to fail to become a currency as intended at first, and instead it becomes a gambling target and political tools for billionaires. That's far from the original purpose.

I agree both are easy to say, but IMO ${new_thing}s fail like 80% of time and, even it succeeds, take much longer time to find its useful usages and it's much narrower than we expected at first. So I think it's better to have skeptical or pessimistic attitudes toward ${new_thing}s by default. BTW I'm impressed by LLMs for some tasks and it makes my job easier, but still feel it's useless for majority of my daily tasks.

Adam Neely created a 15-minute video about this issue. It's redundant but a fun watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y3RGeaxksY

I wish there's a standard for short UUID, like `73WakrfVbNJBaAmhQtEeDv` or `bK7nP9xM`. I mean, it's not UUID cause it can be duplicated somewhere, I just want an ID standart combination of random and short enough to remember.

I bet in a few years the CEO of Apple will be replaced by someone who's only interested in short-term gains, and the stock price may increase even higher at a sharp rate for like a decade or two. Then it becomes like Boeing or Intel; everyone hates it or it's not relevant anymore.

If I win this bet, I'll gain small satisfaction, and my all-index-fund portfolio will be, I don't know, just fine?

edit: typo

I once had to implement an authentication feature for a Chrome extension through Cognito with Google Workspace accounts via OAuth2 or MS accounts via SAML as IdPs. That made me want to die. Just understanding what I want to do or have to do was unbelievably hard, and probably I still don't understand what I did honestly.

Probably that data was used to train AI models too. I hope we establish a legal framework that prevents training models without proper permission, and the companies that have already trained their models will get fined and those models will be banned from commercial use.

I enjoy the rapid progress of LLMs. ChatGPT and Claude are already a critical part of my daily work. But I don't like the current situation where VCs and start-ups use unpermitted data to train the models, don't respect content creators, and take advantage of the lack of regulations.