ByteJockey

> What is the advantage of paying 270€ per month for a 60GB RAM instance with 8 cores if you can get the same instance on Contabo for 27€?

For some random raw EC2 server? Zilch. Zero. EC2 isn't really worth it by itself.

But EC2 isn't the only thing AWS has. Devs are pretty expensive. If you just need to run some random code in the cloud, futzing with a server somewhere for a couple hours making sure it's compliant with all of the enterprise standards costs many hundreds of dollars in dev pay. Lambda just works, and has a free tier. Setting up a proper queuing system is annoying and takes a few hours to do right. That's another couple hundred dollars. SQS is reasonably good and you can have that dev go do other things instead.

These things start to add up fast, and when you do everything yourself, you start to end up with thousands of dollars per month in maintenance costs. You can absolutely do that with AWS as well, but the goal is usually to just let AWS take care of that and have your employees do something that's actually valuable to the business (usually implementing proprietary business logic, which neither AWS nor Hetzner will do for you).

There's a long tradition of just naming things what they are. ed (editor) vi (visual) and emacs (editor macros) all stem from this.

They're shorter, but when they were released (70s for all of them), there was a 6 character limit on a lot of systems for command names.

Or do you mean why is there a space in the name? That would be annoying for launching from the terminal, I can see that.

Local development, usually.

Depends on the size of the company. Over $X revenue or over Y employees and you have to pay. Note that it says revenue, not profit there, be careful with that.

Pretty much. People say that tech people switching doesn't do anything, but when tech people switch, semi-technical people get it via osmosis (forum posts for FF the first time, presumably reddit posts today). Suddenly when someone asks their friend that's slightly more technical than them for a recommendation, they get recommended the new thing instead of the old one.

Whole process takes a couple years or so.

> JS isn't supposed to have only one relevant implementation

I mean, alright, but the way things are supposed to be doesn't have any bearing on the way things actually are. And if you plan based on how things are supposed to be instead of how they are, you're going to experience a lot of pain.

> It's good of Ecma International to keep standing up to that.

In what way are they standing up to it? By keeping things in/out of the spec? My claim here is that the spec doesn't matter. If chrome implements something, people will use it, even if it isn't in the spec, and just let things break in other browsers. If chrome doesn't implement it, people won't use it, even if it is in the spec. You don't see poly-fills for chrome.

Yup. That's considered an acceptable trade-off in the circles I'm talking about.

That's fine in a language with a bunch of implementations, but JS only has one (relevant) implementation.

V8 powers Chrome, all Chrome-based browsers (Brave, Edge, etc), node, and deno.

Sure, you can switch your backend to some esoteric thing based on Rhino, but unlike C/C++/whatever, your end-user's also have an implementation and it matters. And they are overwhelmingly using v8.

The Ecma International is basically naval-gazing at this point. They don't control JS, google does. Just see what happened when they added TCO to the spec and google didn't implement it.

> a tertiary use case of paying for illegal goods and services?

This is the use case mentioned. The OP is saying that everything else about it is useless.

Having the option to do something illegal should the need arise is a benefit to some people, and government control of the financial sector is not beloved by everyone.

TOTP isn't inherently tied to phones.

> Google makes enough money off Chrome and youtube

Chrome is free and youtube notoriously doesn't make a profit (unless this changed in 2021).

Their money comes mostly from search.

That does seem to be the case in a lot of countries. The big exception being the US (including mineral rights).

As someone from the US, it was actually quite surprising finding out other countries handled things this way.

> they just don’t want to pay licensing fees to use them

Can you blame browser makers for this? When was the last time you saw someone pay for a browser? Pre-2005 Opera?

Depends heavily on the country.

I know in the UK, treasure belongs to the crown, but they will usually pay you a percentage for finding "their treasure". In the US, as long as it isn't something that would be sacred to native tribes, it's pretty much yours. In Italy, I'm pretty sure the government just gets it and there's a bunch of burden put on the land owner while they look for more artifacts (there are stories of people destroying roman documents rather than report them to the authorities).

It seems like Polish law would be the only relevant one here (I don't think EU law covers any of this), and based on a cursory search they seem to be much closer to Italy than the US on this spectrum.

It worked pretty well for them for >150 million years.

If we can't deflect an asteroid by the time we've been around that long, we kinda deserve it.

> political (“about how society ought to function”)

I feel like this is a technical definition of political, but that's not how the layman uses the word.

I tend to hear the word political used as a synonym for the current arguments within a society, especially those that professional politicians feel the need to weigh in on and/or there is a significant chance of legislation around.

So, for example, a passionate essay about a Georgism and a land value tax might be political under the technical definition, I don't think it would qualify as political under the layman definition. There's not a sufficient mass of people trying to institute a land value tax for a society wide argument to occur. I don't think the average person would describe aforementioned person as political, I'd say they'd be more likely to be written off as a kook.

Could also be a regional difference. I'm not intimately familiar with all the dialects of the english language.

That might be the difference, nobody (that I've met) in the US would count a public holiday in PTO time.

Google's not super exceptional in this matter (that's mostly their pay/on-site experience). I have 4 weeks (20 days) at the moment, and have for a few years, along with 8 paid holidays (28 days total). Next year I get a fifth week (33 days with holidays). I don't work at a FAANG/MANGA company, but just some random company in the Mid-West.

But I've also worked service jobs before with 0 paid days. Holidays were mandatory work days because everyone who did have decent jobs were off and wanted to eat at a restaurant. The talk about the bottom in the US being below elsewhere isn't a myth. The US doesn't like putting floors on matters this side of the 60s.

> but I think intentions provide a higher floor for the downside risk.

The quote at the end was supposed to convey the opposite message.

> For example, if f is defuned in a file, throughout that file you can assume (f x) refers to that f and does not have to be looked up dynamically at runtime.

Unless you declare them "notinline".

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/d_inli...

> so there is no motivation to write a method unless you actually want the dynamic dispatch methods provide.

Methods have some different functionality in CL than in most languages. For example, you can have the methods from the entire inheritance hierarchy (well, the classes that have had that method specialized for them) all be called as, essentially a pipeline of methods.

https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/clos.html#method-...

But this is a discussion about dynamism of the object system, and most of that is defined before runtime. How about changing an object's class at runtime? https://www.cliki.net/site/HyperSpec/Body/stagenfun_change-c...

The CLOS is more dynamic than python. You can do things like specialize a method on multiple types based on the runtime types (that is to say, the method conceptually belongs to the intersection of the classes, not any single class).

I like python (especially things like comprehensions), but to say it's more dynamic than common lisp is a little insane.

> the CDC is at worst going to do what it thinks is best for you

I don't want to get involved with what the CDC is doing here (because they're probably not doing anything too nefarious), but I would like to pull this point out. The intentions of an institution (or at least surface level justifications) are kind of unrelated to the point. What an institution thinks is best for someone and what that individual thinks is best for themselves are often quite different.

I'm reminded of the old CS Lewis quote here:

> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

> Wait, I don't think that's how work and meetings work.

I'm not including all of the things that come up that don't require a team meeting.

But if we're assuming that something is discovered that requires a full team meeting by each employee roughly once a week (number pulled straight out of my ass, feel free to sub in your own, the math doesn't depend on this), that's 8 meetings a week for the 8 person team (totaling roughly 64 hours), and only 4/4 for the team of 4.

This is, of course, assuming the rate of discovery of things discovered requiring a meeting remain constant as the team increases. In my experience, this is not the case, and it usually tends to increase as people lose track of what everyone else is doing, there's an increased need to "re-sync". I believe this increased need is what drives it from exponential (in my naive answer) to the combinatorial (in practice) increase people usually quote when throwing around Brooks' Law.

> And I was thinking "not even!" It's been my experience that scaling up employee count, has diminishing returns, with even some net negatives with some adds.

That's fair, but I don't think you're going to hit that from 1 -> 2. It's been my experience that 4-5 is where the diminishing returns start really happening and a complete loss of gain at around 4-8.

> So why is this? Why does it work in computing, but not with people? Is it the nature of the tasks (one is problem solving, the other is grinding out computations?).

With a worker (computer) the task has generally been completely defined before the task starts. Tasks done by human workers generally require a portion of "deciding how to do the thing". Assuming that requires full team meetings, on a team of 8, it requires 8 times as many meetings for 8 people and each meeting taking up 8 times the number of people's time (~64x time loss).

this is compared to a hypothetical "1 person meeting", which would probably just be someone sitting around thinking about the best way to do something

> A 4-day work week usually means that a work week is reduced from 40 to 32 hours without a loss of compensation.

Is that what's being discussed here? My mind immediately went to a 4 10s situation (which, while not the norm, is fairly common in the US).

I think the implied problem is that the CS programs are passing these people.

Someone signing up for a class and not learning anything is a problem. Someone passing a class and not learning anything is a big problem for the signaling power of that degree.

Aside from the fact that I don't want them to win this, I kind of want them to win because the fallout would be hilarious.

I think everyone working in perl 6 calls it Raku now. Perl generally means perl 5 (or possibly older versions in a really legacy environment).

> I don't know if it's possible to make a die that always rolls the same

The easiest way would be to put the same number on every side, which would probably fail a superficial human inspection (but might pass a surprising number of machine inspections).

Blocking could be filtering out the replies rather than preventing a reply.

> I particularly abhor Go style uppercase for public visibility and much prefer Rust's explicit syntax.

I don't want to comment on Go's visibility here, but is it that much different than how in Rust the lack of a semi-colon means you're returning (or the presence of a semi-colon means it's an expression instead of a statement, which has tripped me up many more times than the inverse)?