jaza

Amen!

Computer scientists in the ~1970s said that procedural languages are a miserable medium for programming, compared to assembly languages.

And they said in the ~1960s that assembly languages are a miserable medium for programming, compared to machine languages.

(Ditto for every other language paradigm under the sun since then, particularly object-oriented languages and interpreted languages).

I agree that natural languages are a miserable medium for programming, compared to procedural / object-oriented / functional / declarative languages. But maybe I only agree because I'm a computer scientist from the ~2010s!

Sounds like Australian kids will just use private / incognito browser windows (aka porn mode) even more than they do already. I fail to see what this new "policy" will achieve, apart from my above point, plus serving as an excuse for Google and pals to subject users to ever more facial recognition and to brazenly collect ever more personal data.

Because now it has been "unveiled"! I guess it was wrapped in cellophane before...

Probably timed to coincide with the peak of the tourist season in Peru. Dry season is May-Oct (not at all advisable to visit Machu Picchu in the wet season). Jul-Aug is summer holidays for Europeans, who are the biggest cohort of international tourists in Peru (and summer holidays for North Americans). And Peru's independence day is 28 Jul, so locals take an (often extended) long weekend, so a bit of a spike in domestic tourism coming up too.

I'm a notorious Apple hater, so I can't say I'll shed a tear if Apple does take a sizeable hit. But then again, I'm also a big sceptic of the AI hype wave currently gripping the world. My bet is that it's the latter, not Apple, that has 24 to 36 months left to live.

I wouldn't worry, I forecast we'll have peace in the Middle East before we have true AGI.

So then, is "headhunting" more or less bad?

No, I'm pretty sure they're stealing souls. That or kidneys.

Switched all my python stuff to poetry several years ago. Still kinda tired and shagged out from that endeavour. Yeah yeah, ok ok, if y'all keep raving THIS much about uv, I guess it must be pretty good ... still, sigh, yet another One True (tm) python package management solution. It's on my todo list, I'll get around to it, I reckon within the next 12 months, currently I have no pressing need to move away from poetry.

Hahaha... so ChatGPT-generated Node / React apps is the new Excel with VBA macros!

Please share your writings more often. Nuclear attack combines, bring it on!

Sounds to me like "immigration in Lisbon or in Paris or in both cities or in neither city" is a trick question, because (on top of immigration in Lisbon as the Schengen entry point) surely the traveller also needs to clear immigration in Sao Paulo (as the Brazil / Mercosur exit point)?

Thanks for this, it should be added to school curricula worldwide!

Yep. The St Ives one involved a fairly protracted debate at the local council, with accusations of anti-semitism (whether warranted or not is a matter of opinion) being levelled at those who argued against it.

Although I don't know if the Bondi and/or the St Ives eruvs involve their own physical wires? I thought it was deemed sufficient for the rabbis to just "declare" various sets of third-party power lines / phone lines as constituting the eruv, or am I mistaken?

Imagine that a whole nation's statute laws, and associated common laws, were frozen in time for over a thousand years, because (the statutes were declared to be immutable canon, and) any judges with sufficient authority to strike out old common law and to establish new common law were long gone. That's Judaism (specifically the Talmud)! (Speaking from experience as a Jew.)

The "eruv" definition was established back when the biggest conceivable area that it might cover was that of a medieval village or ghetto, of maximum several hundred (small cramped) houses, i.e. let's say about the area of Vatican City, which is 0.49km2 (0.19 sq mi). Whereas the total area of Manhattan island is 59km2 (22.7 sq mi). So, yes, in my opinion, a Talmudic judge would consider the modern-day Manhattan eruv a gross perversion of the spirit of the law, and would update the definition accordingly. But no such judge exists in this era. So, yay, let's play "how ridiculously can we apply anachronistic archaic rules to the modern world" - apparently, ultra-orthodox Jews consider it such a fun game, that they let it rule their entire life!

My conclusion from this is: ChatGPT is the new Google, so LLM hints is the new SEO.

It remains an unsolved problem! For example, Facebook's "solution" was to buy Instagram.

Centralised and heavily censored, yes, but AFAICT the censoring by-and-large respects free speech and diversity of opinion, while effectively stopping spam / abuse, and thus maintaining the high quality of content that keeps us all coming back.

And surely HN is way less monetised (and therefore way more trustworthy) than virtually every other links site / every social media platform out there?

Ah yes, the ol' default empty list Python gotcha, it bit me I think about 10 years ago, and ever since, sadly I've written code like this so many times it's not funny:

    def fun(a = None):
        _a = a if a is not None else []

Not me! For a number of years, I was like "what's with that domain, never heard of ycombinator, oh well, can't be bothered reading up on it right now, anyway, great content here, and nice minimal interface, I'll keep coming back".

Yes, I've tried AI image generation, and while it's impressive, it's also - at the end of the day - just as bland and unoriginal a mashup of existing material as AI text generation is.

All humans (I believe!) have the potential to be that amazing. And all humans come up with amazing ideas and produce amazing works in their life, just that 99% of us aren't appreciated as much as the famous 1% are. We're all valuable.

Back in my day, we also called it Garbage In Garbage Out.

The "value of a human" - same in this age as it has always been - is our ability to be truly original and to think outside the box. (That's also what makes us actually quite smart, and what makes current cutting-edge "AI" actually quite dumb).

AI is incapable of producing anything that's not basically a statistical average of its inputs. You'll never get an AI Da Vinci, Einstein, Kant, Pythagoras, Tolstoy, Kubrick, Mozart, Gaudi, Buddha, nor (most ironically?) Turing. Just to name a few historical humans whose respective contributions to the world are greater than the sum of the world's respective contributions to them.

I worked for a large-ish software company that had paid for a WinRAR license once upon a time, and that AFAIK still uses WinRAR for certain mission-critical tasks to this day. We often joked that we were the only people who had ever actually paid for a legitimate copy of WinRAR - although sounds like we were far from alone!

Valid points in the article and in many of the comments here. BUT: taken to the extreme, "yes, reinvent the wheel!" quickly becomes NIH ("not invented here") syndrome, which I've seen one too many times in enterprise stacks, as I'm sure plenty of you folks have too. We don't need no stinkin' wheels from the OUTSIDE!

I think every codebase needs a healthy and pragmatic balance of "this particular wheel we can and should build ourselves, and it'll work better (for us at least!) than any other wheels out there" vs "there is a standard wheel for this, 10 million other horse-and-carriages out there use the same wheel, it's not worth us using a non-standard wheel for this thing".

As a (mainly) Python dev, I'm aware that there are DI frameworks out there, but personally I haven't to date used any of them.

My favourite little hack for simple framework-less DI in Python these days looks something like this:

    # The code that we want to call
    def do_foo(sleep_func = None):
        _sleep_func = sleep_func if sleep_func is not None else time.sleep

        for _ in range(10):
            _sleep_func(1)

    # Calling it in non-test code
    # (we want it to actually take 10 seconds to run)
    def main():
        do_foo()

    # Calling it in test code
    # (we want it to take mere milliseconds to run, but nevertheless we
    # want to test that it sleeps 10 times!)
    def test_do_foo():
        mock_sleep_func = MagicMock()
        do_foo(sleep_func=mock_sleep_func)
        assert mock_sleep_func.call_count == 10

I think I can understand the boat you're in, bro. Both of the things that you don't do, I also didn't do for quite a long time, and I didn't particularly see the value in doing them (once upon a time); but I've been on a journey to make them part of how I code, and I'm pretty sure that I'm a better coder now than I was back then.

Writing tests for nearly all my code, in particular, is these days the only way I roll - and as for TDD (i.e. write the test and let it fail first, then write the actual code and make the test pass), I do it quite often, and I guarantee you that - contrary to your opinion - it makes coding a whole new kind of fun and creative. Dependency injection I still consider myself less of a ninja at, but I've done it (and seen it done) enough times now that I get it and I see the value in it.

I think it's a bit stupid for an employer to say "we'd never have hired you if we knew you had no experience in X" (sure, this doesn't apply to all skills, but I'd say it applies to quite a few). If you're worth hiring, then you'll pick up X within a few months on the job. I'm grateful to several past employers of mine, for showing me the ropes of TDD and DI (among many other things).

Anyway, I'm not saying that the above things are "the (only) right way to do it", and please don't take my above ramblings as making a judgement on your coding prowess. I agree, do what works for you. I'm just saying that there's always more to learn, and that you should always strive to be open-minded to new skills and new approaches.

Great that this is a library. Really need this as a SaaS too. iseven.ai anyone?

Yes, there are a lot of people working in places in Sydney other than the CBD, and yes, a much higher proportion of those people drive to work.

And yes, there are still enough people who drive into the Sydney CBD in peak hour, to cause massive traffic (and to keep the carparks, aka parking lots, being very lucrative businesses!). Nevertheless, they're a minority - more than 75% of people commute to the Sydney CBD on public transport [1].

Also, re: traffic from Balmain in peak hour. Plenty of places you can be going to, eastbound on the Anzac Bridge, apart from the CBD! I'd say a significant number of those drivers would be heading north of the harbour to work (eg North Sydney, St Leonards / Crows Nest, maybe Chatswood, maybe Macquarie Park), and they'd be bypassing the CBD thanks to the Western Distributor (could also be connecting to Cross City Tunnel to eg Bondi Junction, also Eastern Distributor to Randwick / Waterloo).

[1] https://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/d...

Wow - there's free street parking in Lower Manhattan?! Yep, there's your problem!

Here in Sydney Australia, we don't have any congestion charge (there's been some talk about introducing one, but it's not really on the cards at this time). But it's pretty much impossible to find parking in the CBD (Mon-Fri 9-5) for less than around AUD$60 (USD$40) per day. There is literally no un-metered street parking anywhere in the CBD (also the parking inspectors are everywhere). Plus many of the routes in are tolled (although by no means all routes). Plus, things like the numerous one-way streets, bus-only lanes (with cameras), and ultra-low speed limits, makes it an extremely unpleasant driving experience (with a high risk of getting fines), for folks who are used to just driving in the suburbs. All of that effectively acts as a congestion charge - most people choose public transport over driving, when heading into the city centre, because in practice the cost of regularly doing the latter is prohibitive.