Yes. What GP is omitting is that Wellington winters are akin to England but with a great deal more wind. In the summer, that commute is likely wonderful, but for four months of the year, it isn't.
438 karma · joined May 10, 2016
I built my first computer about 17 years ago but dial up was still a thing and I was discouraged from spending time on it so I just did html in the 30 minutes per day I was allowed. If I'd have found a REPL back then, I probably wouldn't feel so inadequate when discussing concepts with my friends at the big 4! It'll work out fine, but later than planned; the spectre of unemployability will start looming in a decade or so, which certainly motivates me!
That said, WRT GP's post, I don't think it's a million miles off. AI will undoubtedly become a cornerstone of modern life and I don't think the scenario they outline is entirely unlikely. Siri is objectively pretty hopeless, particularly when compared to its counterparts but it's been a nice clue as to what we can expect from modern innovation.
I would conjecture that very few locals know about it - it really isn't something you'd find unless you knew what you were looking for and the few conversations I have had about it with people in the surrounding towns and villages frequently yield blank looks; the creation of a Wikipedia page for the caves only yesterday [1] also supports this hypothesis. That said, the inside is littered with cigarette butts and tea lights, so I am far from alone in knowing of its existence.
As for its purpose, I've always assumed it was some priest hole [2] variant, but have no evidence to support that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Caynton_Caves&act...
For me though, what's the point? I like that lru_cache is a convenient decorator rather than having to roll my own memoisation and that some relatively solid steps have been made towards async programming but that's about it. Its not like the changes were things that couldn't be achieved before (Twisted is solid, from what I have seen so far). I still have to factor in the GIL if I want performance to a certain point (dual core processors have been around for almost two decades now - I am starting to question why cPython is even considered a serious choice for use cases where prod has more than one core).
More crucially though? The APIs. camelCase features heavily (in spite of PEP8), the principle of most surprise is rampant (I recall last week discovering a function signature with infinite arity rather than passing a collection, like, you know, every other Python method) and SO many more warts. When interacting with a file, try and guess what you want: "readlines? Doesn't load each line into collection, which is what you'd expect. writeline? Be sure to manually interpolate a \n because in contrast to the name, it's actually going to insert everything on the same line because... well, who knows. writelines? Well, you know how in Python you usually iterate over over thing and handle it? Well here, you pass a collection. There's a corresponding read meth... No there isn't". If we're introducing breaking changes, how weren't these things fixed? You either commit to breaking changes or you don't make any - py3 trod the line somewhere in the middle and is paying for it with its adoption numbers. The broader point is that this mess is exactly why we all love libraries like requests. If Python were a Fortune 500 company, GvR would have been ousted as CEO long ago, and rightly so.
As a contractor, I have to absorb this new way of doing things in case I find a job that actually requires Py3 knowledge (in the UK at least, these are less frequent than HN prefers to make out) because my marketability depends on it. That said, although I'm currently contributing to Pypy, I realistically see my future in Clojure, Ruby, Elixir or some other language that I'm prepared to put the time into picking up, in contrast to Py3, where I see missteps and hamstrung APIs as active disincentivisation to my learning. Any half decent dev will just move on, because why would they put up with this? Did we not learn anything from PHP?
I wonder how long until the banking industry gets the disrupt it so desperately needs.