porcoda

Oy. Can we just admit that some people like remote work, some don’t, and let everyone self select into the appropriate employers? Does anyone ever get anything new and useful out of the comments on posts like this? It seems like they just turn into the same ‘you’re wrong’, ‘no, you’re wrong!’ back and forths that are devoid of anything of substance.

This is why the web (and computing in general) is the way it is today: everything prioritizes what businesses and developers want, and the desires/needs of the people who actually use it are considered afterthoughts and annoying inconveniences. :-(

Native speaker, and title confused me even being familiar with the whole owned/pwned thing. I clicked on the article simply because I was curious why being a 4chan-using sole proprietor would be at all interesting.

It’s a bit above the National average according to:

https://drugabusestatistics.org/drug-overdose-deaths/

Assuming 900000 people in San Francisco, the national average would say about 190/yr. One every 10hrs would mean 876/yr, or 4.6x the national average.

Option types are from ML, not rust. ML predates rust by about 40+ years.

Yes. I have just 2 of these managed networks : AT&T Wi-Fi Passpoint and attwifi. It could be that they’ll switch auto join back on if I move somewhere that they’re visible. Edit: just out of curiosity I rebooted to see if that would toggle auto-join back on, but it did not.

It’s been 30 minutes and they’re still off for me. I’ll check again later.

> they cannot have “automatically join” disabled

They can on my AT&T iOS 16.4 device. I was able to disable auto-join on the two AT&T ones. I didn't need to delete a network to enable the "done" button from the edit screen - the state I toggled for auto-joining the managed networks persisted even if I hit cancel on the edit screen.

I don't like that they're there and auto-join is on by default, but it does appear that can be turned off.

Seems odd to me to group places like NY and SF together solely based on the second derivative of their population. If one has bounced back and restarted growth, while the other continues to shrink, just less rapidly, you can’t say they’re comparable. Regrowth vs slowed shrinkage are different things, even if they look similar by calculus.

This has been the story of Apple apps outside MacOS forever: they appear to always do the absolute minimum to claim support, and you end up with a super clunky windows app that is terrible.

I doubt they’d do much better using electron: I think their development model is that if it isn’t on one of their platforms, they pump out a minimum-effort, low quality app. I’d guess that electron ones would be just as clunky, except with a significantly higher memory and CPU footprint.

Depends on the domain you’re going to work in. Nobody understands all major CS domains in depth - you typically specialize and dive deep in the relevant area. It’s like any other field: no physicist knows all major areas of physics, no mathematician knows all major areas of math. Perhaps 50 years ago when the field was really new it was possible to understand all of CS, but it’s a big field now that covers a really diverse set of topics that each are relatively deep.

Even then, you often don’t need to dive deep into the math unless you’re a working researcher for the most part. I work in languages research, and to be honest, for most of the work you don’t need to dive deep into type theory or category theory (regardless of what some internet people would lead you to believe). You generally only need to dig deep into those if you find yourself working in foundations topics where they play a strong role.

I’m not using it at all. Until I can run it locally and guarantee my interactions with it are entirely private and under my control, I won’t touch it or related services. I’m constantly surprised to see people who talk so much about privacy and data protection using such systems. That said, when self hosting is an option I’m very excited to use it.

Your notion of “common things” may not be universal. In the sciences where Python is extremely popular, many common things are quite computationally demanding and feel the slowness of Python quite acutely and the slowdown certainly does make a difference. Looking at this shark thing, they appear to be concerned with games and interfaces, which have their own demands and likely have similar problems where the performance difference is very tangible.

It has always been user hostile since the days of pop-over ads, pop-under ads, obnoxious browser toolbars that were basically malware, etc. It seems like since around the year 2000 it’s been a nonstop fight between people who want to extract money and advertising impressions out of users versus people trying to keep the web user friendly. I think we only had maybe a 5 year run of the web being user-friendly at the beginning, and that was just because people hadn’t quite yet figured out how to extract money from web usage.

We could just get rid of comments on videos altogether. The benefit of squelching the mechanism scammers and trolls have available to them seems to greatly outweigh whatever is lost by just getting rid of comments.

A surprising number of non-fiction books these days are unbearable to read since I find the authors often use them as a thinly disguised autobiography masquerading as a book about a specific topic. I recently read an astrophysics book that I was excited to read based on the actual astrophysics topic, but it really was a book about the author's adventures and struggles through grad school and postgrad doing research in the topic of the book. I did not want to read about their "journey" - I didn't care before I started, and I cared even less after reading it. I find this leads to books feeling very fluffy and lacking the subject-matter depth that I wish for.

This isn't just a problem with non-fiction books. I find more often than not in long form journalism lately the writers seem to not be able to resist becoming characters in their own writing. I could have sworn at one point it was considered bad journalistic form to become part of the story versus reporting it. Apparently those days are gone.

I’d normally say Javascript, but that world seems to be a little over saturated with people, which causes contention for available jobs. If you go the C#/.NET route (or even Java) you’ll be set up for common “enterprise” jobs that appear all over the place in non-tech companies (e.g., insurance companies, finance, manufacturing, or anyplace that uses computers to the degree where they roll some of their own code).

I’d also learn a bit about databases: SQL is a skill I’m happy I picked up a few decades ago since it has come up repeatedly over my career, even though the bulk of my tech work has been non-database stuff.

The placement of the national labs in DOE is mostly a historical artifact of the time they were born. They cover most sciences these days and it isn’t uncommon to hear people with DOE jokingly refer to it as the “department of everything”.

There isn’t any external pressure to give people an incentive to do better. Until that arrives, we’re stuck in this crap software local minimum.

I’m hoping such pressure arrives in the form of legal or regulatory stuff, even if it chills the industry and slows/shrinks it. Until then we’re still in the computing equivalent of the auto industry when people died in mild fender benders that today are just mild annoyances.

You might be interested in Guy Steele’s talk “It’s time for a new old language”. He talks about similar notations and the problem of inventing new ones (although most of his talk is about things other than BNF-like notations : he just talks about them for a bit in the beginning). It’s an interesting talk and is useful in thinking about proposing new notations.

YouTube: https://youtu.be/7HKbjYqqPPQ

If you search for the talk title you can find the PDF of the slides.

You fixated on what I said was the secondary reason, and repeated in a rephrased way what I said was the primary reason - economics/cost.

Given that users rarely get to make the choice, I’m not sure we have evidence saying people actually are happy with the sacrifice. I do know people complain a lot about battery life, laggy apps, and unpredictable behavior that often can be traced down to the technologies used to implement them. The problem is, your average user doesn’t actually know that’s the case, and doesn’t even realize that alternatives are even an option. People like me and the audience on HN are the outliers : most people have no clue what’s going on under their bank app, corporate app, ticket app, etc…

> the performance of a well written UI in a modern browser out-performs a native desktop application in every category of sped, usability and presentation for most usual use cases

This definitely needs evidence to back it up since my personal experience (and apparently from reading the comments, others as well) is the opposite.

Just be honest: the primary reason by far for the preference for GUIs using web tech over native is economics. One code base, multiple platforms. Native requires nontrivial per-target specialized code, which is expensive to develop and maintain. Web tech has given us the closest I can see to what Java promised but failed to adequately deliver: write once, run everywhere.

I would guess there’s a secondary reason: the tech world has an excess of web tech developers running around, and they tend to use what they know - for better or worse.

Even more reason to be skeptical about the title here. “Anonymous comment on rumor site” is hardly a basis for a factual title…

Who said it’s interpreted?

I often see posts that I know are going to be full of comments that will just irritate me, so hiding the post is the easiest way to not accidentally wander into a sea of comments that I’d rather not see.

It's not a question of what one can do that the other can't. They can both achieve the same thing (they both map to CIL after all). It's usually a question of ergonomics - how much work do you want to put in to achieve the same goal. Things like algebraic data types (discriminated unions in F# speak), currying, etc. all are just a matter of making the compiler do some things that you'd do by hand in a language like C#. While you can accomplish the same thing in C#, languages like F# do it for you so you get both ease (compiler does the work) and correctness (compiler not likely to mess up where you might by hand). I bias towards the F# world for the ease and correctness reasons, but there's nothing stopping a careful programmer from achieving the same thing in the C# world.

To some degree it’s immaturity of the field as a whole. I think that we accepted some pretty negative behavior as normal and many people still echo it in the way they act if they want to come across as a Smart and Successful Tech Person. We have too many shitty role models in this field still.

Exactly. The single biggest hurdle for me using some open source tools written with newer languages is the ridiculous dependency surface due to a preference for package repositories over curated “batteries included” bundled libraries. I work in an environment that is hyper sensitive to supply chain integrity, which means a lot of languages that have a culture of “use all the third party packages” are out for us.

Give me a batteries included standard library please - much easier to audit and track.

Ownership isn’t a matter of physical existence or duration of some physical property.

"Colour" is oversimplifying it a bit. We're usually concerned with the distribution of light received with respect to wavelength. In the case of distance, it's not just that "it's red", but that the entire spectrum has been shifted in the direction of red. That means the features that correspond to, say, a specific Hydrogen emission, appear slightly offset from where they would if you were looking at it in a lab. When you look at age and size, you're looking at the distribution of the spectrum irrespective of a shift and seeing if it's heavier in the red, blue, or somewhere else. That tells you a lot about composition and mass, which helps with the age and size questions.

TL;DR: the use of color terms (e.g., "red") is oversimplifying what astronomers actually do which is an analysis of the overall spectrum and its properties.