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nadagast

81 karma · joined August 9, 2013

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nadagast··on MacKenzie Scott's giving, in quality-adjusted life years
Interesting that I could _immediately_ tell the model visualization was built with Claude
nadagast··on Wow, if it's this easy in 1998, I bet it'll be even easier in 2026
I enjoyed this. But reading the claim that the iPhone was bad compared to other phones of the day makes me question it all. That's so incredibly backwards. It _was_ a much better internet in your pocket. If you couldn't see that, it says something about you, not phones.
nadagast··on Why choose async/await over threads?
I think a lot of this type of problem goes away with immutable data and being more careful with side effects (for example, firing them all at once at the end rather than dispersed through the calculation)
nadagast··on If You Don't Change the UI, Nobody Notices (2009)
You think the only reason vim & emacs aren't used as much as iOS/Android/Windows (or equivalent defaults on those platforms) is familiarity?
nadagast··on If You Don't Change the UI, Nobody Notices (2009)
I think there have been and will continue to be UX improvements to programmer tools. GitHub is one example.

You think tools that stagnate will continue to see the same levels of adoption in new generations of programmers? It's an empirical question, I guess I just don't see it, and I say that as someone who loves vim & emacs.

nadagast··on If You Don't Change the UI, Nobody Notices (2009)
I use and love emacs, but pointing to it as an example of how to evolve UX over time is indicative of your perspective. iOS/Windows/Android are used by the majority of people on the planet, emacs is not.

Which UX do you think young people today and in the future will most understand? iOS/Android or emacs? Why is that?

nadagast··on Datomic is Free
Day-tomic I believe
nadagast··on Made in America is back, leaving US factories scrambling to find workers
Isn't it because there's a ton of new supply of labor from around the world?
nadagast··on YouTube’s ‘dislike’ barely works according to new study on recommendations
Maybe the system was different back then, but now Avoid will only avoid the player as a teammate, they can still be on the enemy team. So if someone is too good, there's no incentive to avoid them.
nadagast··on Why Vladimir Putin and his entourage want war
indeed
nadagast··on How to Create a SaaS and Compete with the Big Players as a Solo Founder
We're working on task management + email, I kept your comment [1] from awhile ago. I don't see any way to contact you in your profile, are you interested in trying an alpha? Email me at garrett at twobird.com

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23693582

nadagast··on Why don’t the French celebrate Lafayette?
Mike Duncan and Revolutions is great, endorse!

His previous podcast, The History of Rome, is also great.

nadagast··on Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional
I know -- I meant more about making sure they don't make public places unsafe/unclean.
nadagast··on Ask HN: Are you terrified of Plaid’s account verification approach?
Yeah, when I first saw the flow, I was shocked...
nadagast··on Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional
I think we should do everything we can to give/push them into treatment, but at the very least they don't get to make streets unsafe and unclean for others, they have to go elsewhere
nadagast··on Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional
100% this -- is this really an unpopular opinion?
nadagast··on The Education of Melvyn Bragg
In Our Time is a wonderful podcast, always interesting content! Also, as an American, the pace of the show and way of speaking is itself interesting to me.
nadagast··on If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund
This was one of the biggest things that struck me when I visited Japan. Their cities are just so much friendlier/better than 99% of American cities.
nadagast··on The Database Inside Your Codebase
This brings back thoughts I've had that we should be working with normalized data in code, rather than thick objects. I think the main reason we don't is because there's a lack of tooling around it in our languages. I think a system/language/library designed around this could solve some of the problems in the article as well. First class support for having only one value for a given domain specific id, relations, declaratively describing constraints, and strong querying seem like they would be very helpful to lots of programming problems in complex apps.
nadagast··on Cyclic dependencies are evil (2013)
This is the right answer and I wish more languages would make this dramatically more ergonomic to do. Store the most basic normalized truth and query/derive what you need.
nadagast··on Avoid News: Towards a Healthy News Diet (2010) [pdf]
But how will you decide which is worth knowing if you never look? I get why you may want to take it in at a slower pace than a social media feed, but it seems like there's no way to tell what's worth knowing if you "stop consuming news".
nadagast··on Avoid News: Towards a Healthy News Diet (2010) [pdf]
> On the whole, you are not ignorant if you don't consume the news, not by any standard.

I don't mean this in an insulting way, but aren't you ignorant (by definition) of current events if you don't read/hear about them?

nadagast··on Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?
> I guess I overlooked it because the other way is so logically trivial, since it basically boils down

Yeah, that's (part of) Hickey's point. That the "best" type systems fail this test, and require manual programmer work to solve this problem. Again, I'm saying this as someone who really appreciates Haskell.

nadagast··on Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?
Yes, the default of a lot of languages, (Java, C, etc) where nil is implicitly a member of every other type is a bad default. But that's a separate question.
nadagast··on Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?
I agree that there are reasons for Maybe a to be a different type from (a | nil) but there are also good reasons to prefer (a | nil). Like most things, it's a set of tradeoffs. What I appreciated about this talk was that he went into the benefits of thinking about types in this way. It's (relatively) common to see the benefits of Maybe a explained, but more rare to see the benefits of full union types explained.
nadagast··on Ask HN: Best talks of 2018?
Why is it illogical to say that a Maybe a -> b should be callable as if it were a -> b?

His point is that Maybe a should be composed of all the values of a, plus one more value, nil. A value of type a is a member of the set (nil + a). Why should having a more specific value reduce the things you can do with it? It breaks composition, fundamentally. It's like saying (+) works on integers, but not on 3. I'm saying this someone who really enjoys type systems, including haskell.

nadagast··on F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules
- Two unstable people with nukes and a lot of angry rhetoric. And this today: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/12/li... -- not a great situation.

- Don't know enough about tax cuts.

- "Zero evidence of any of that" is a completely ridiculous thing to say. Get out of your bubble. Try to see the world from the other POV, there are many pieces of evidence that point in this direction. If you step back from moment-to-moment politics and try to look at what's already publicly known, from a historical perspective, it's already an unbelievable scandal.

- I don't think he consciously wants to be a fascist dictator, but it's again completely ridiculous for you to say there's "zero evidence of that sort of behavior". He does many things that point in that direction, if only you look. And, concretely, he's destroying norms that keep us not-fascist, barriers are being torn down right now. That degrades our system and populace and will make it easier for future people to transgress further.

- I don't know enough about what regulations he's rolled back. But dropping out of the Paris agreement and simply not taking action for the next four years have a significant impact.

nadagast··on Woman offers WaPo false tale about Roy Moore in effort to discredit the paper
This would be a reasonable opinion if the far right reacted to this event by giving credit to WaPo--if their genuine interest was in the truth and good reporting. Unfortunately truth and good reporting is not their goal, and this entire story will be presented in a very different light on far right sites.
nadagast··on Near Future of Programming Languages [pdf]
I've been thinking a lot about nearly these exact same things. We desperately need better ways to deal with derived textual data. Why do we make the programmer guess which data structure will work best for a particular task, when we could easily try it each way and record the performance, and pick the best? A big part of the reason must be that we have no good strategy for storing that data and making that choice in an ongoing and living way, inside of a code repository. We suck at dealing with derived data on the meta layer above our programming languages.

Email me at glmitchell[at]gmail if you want to chat more about this.

nadagast··on Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11
I agree, it's better than iOS 10. Though quitting apps does feel worse, but maybe that's intentional?
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