spencerwgreene

Nothing in the post is wrong, but there's an anti-pattern where teams resist change, the software ossifies, and people cite these mantras like "slow is smooth and smooth is fast", when in reality the users just want new features shipped on the order of weeks/months, not quarters/years. Users eventually lose patience, leave or fork the code or solve their problem differently, and route around the team that doesn't get stuff done.

I'm pretty sure fmt.Println("HELLO", str, len(str), len(result), n) isn't supposed to be in the final solution? :)

The HR is in the top left, it overwrites the pre-initialized text console.

Finally. So many college students I know have tried building this but none took off because it really does need to be in the Spotify app.

The Microsoft blog post that the article is using as a source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/update-2-on-microsoft....

Q: "What is the most promising startup idea you’ve heard that didn’t succeed?"

PG: "Maybe Pebble. It could have been the next Apple. But hardware startups are a bitch. External factors can kill you in a way that doesn’t happen with software, and you can’t do things as gradually as you can with software."

This answer stood out to me the most since many of the other questions are answered somewhat in his essays already.

The fully loaded cost of an employee for a business is not the employee's salary.

"The fully-loaded costs of employees are much higher than their salary: exactly how much higher depends on your locality’s laws, your benefits package, and a bunch of other HR administrivia, but a reasonable guesstimate is between 150% and 200% of their salary." -https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

> I can’t think of anything more important or critical than software that runs on a commercial airplane.

Nuclear reactors?

Related: https://twitter.com/kvogt/status/1226550931086610433.

People will start to wash their hands more, touch their faces less, and avoid sick people more because of checklists to avoid coronavirus that people are sharing online.

The WSJ updated the article this links to with the transaction price, $5.3 billion, "Visa to Pay $5.3 Billion for Fintech Startup." Maybe the HN title for this item should be updated?

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.11211. Tweets: https://twitter.com/mark_ledwich/status/1210743158184693760.

> Founded in 2010, Stripe is middle-aged by Silicon Valley standards, but Mr. Gaybrick and Stripe president John Collison said it had no plans to go public.

Why doesn't Stripe want to become a public company?

If you had an equivalent Cheat Sheet for other programming languages (no programs or opinions), which language would look best?

Link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.02187.

There are sentiments in this article that I think will mislead people into doing nothing with their lives. For example,

> "Ambition for the more obvious and boring forms of power — political, financial — may not always be inherently evil, but it does tend to have unfortunate side effects in the form of poverty, slave labor, pogroms and unwelcome territorial advances."

This is how ambition works in a zero-sum world. It doesn't mention technology improving the lives of people. There's a related essay by Paul Graham, "How to Make Wealth" [1]. The "Wealth and Power" section is relevant.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Google Docs is already showing "Some tools might be unavailable due to heavy traffic in this file."

I predict this posts hits 100 points and then it crashes. (Currently at 31.)

The author says, "That Go uses arbitrary-precision for constant expressions seems dangerous to me."

Why?

My thoughts: 1) more inefficient programs because encountering an arbitrary-precision expression requires arbitrarily large memory and computation, 2) more complicated language implementation.

This reminds me of the section "Money Is Not Wealth" from Paul Graham's How to Make Wealth [1]:

"The solution societies find, as they get more specialized, is to make the trade into a two-step process. Instead of trading violins directly for potatoes, you trade violins for, say, silver, which you can then trade again for anything else you need. The intermediate stuff-- the medium of exchange-- can be anything that's rare and portable. Historically metals have been the most common, but recently we've been using a medium of exchange, called the dollar, that doesn't physically exist. It works as a medium of exchange, however, because its rarity is guaranteed by the U.S. Government."

The "two-step process" part reminds me of pointers, strangely. The metaphor doesn't make much sense though. A dollar points to wealth? Dereferencing a dollar obtains the wealth it points to?

[1] http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

More broadly, I think this point touches on the idea that you cannot trust code that you did not write yourself. Ken Thompson's Turing Award speech talks about this (https://www.archive.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p7...).

Have you tried Audible? Works great for me for the doing laundry, washing dishes, commuting, etc., modes.

I traveled around Europe for a month recently with my phone in airplane mode the whole time (except when needing to call a taxi at 3:30am in Venice, Italy). In the first week I also found myself doing this.

As long as technological progress continues improving, we will unintentionally (and intentionally) make things more addictive than before. The same process that drives good technological progress also drives bad technological progress.

Paul Graham's essay on this (http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html).