breatheoften

An insufficient auto-formatter is very frustrating ...

I think there are very smart older programmers who don't appreciate this fact properly. They sort of have a belief that there does not exist a "sufficiently good" good code formatter for all users -- and so therefore code formatter should have tons of configuration options to satisfy a range of style choices.

I think that opinion belongs in the past (with the discussion of tabs vs spaces). We have witnessed the existence of sufficiently high quality opinionated code formatters (java, gofmt, prettier, ...) -- and these code formatters without style choices produce a better world.

The way to get there is to find and prefer the non controversial formatting choices -- that means style preferences are abstracted away and consensus building grows from examples of code that everyone agrees is wrong and wants to fix.

The rust formatting issue he highlights makes me really annoyed -- the format chosen by the auto formatter for that sample code is not the best for that situation -- and I'm pretty sure it would be non-controversial for folks to agree on that ... am i right?

I'm doing some swift in xcode after awhile using an ide that lets me have "reformat on save" and the experience of "reformat on save" is good enough that I think it probably should be adopted as a first class goal of language designers -- there should be a language level "reformat on save" story that language designers assume will be used ... Baking in reformat on save as an assumed feature at language design time could allow creation or recovery from "write only" syntaxes -- (nice to write but ambiguous to read) -- either added on purpose or by mistake. Would also allow for really powerful Language evolution cleanup opportunities and the opportunity to introduce semantic changes where old functionality is preserved with complete compatibility until the source file is interactively edited from within an editor (eg the semantic change produces a code diff) ...

Interesting thread.

Is there a microvm that can run chromium with puppeteer?

I've been thinking that server side chromium might actually turn into a pretty badass application server platform ... security, async, remote debug, webasm for cross platform secure binaries ...

Some efficient infrastructure for deploying is needed -- but should be far easier to create a fast server runtime for puppeteer+chromium than it is to create a generic container execution environment ... -- so the microvm approach seems like the right one for what i want ...

debugging imo is terrible via the touchbar -- but was also terrible with function keys!

Binding a two character keystroke (cmd-shift-c for step next for me) is vastly superior ux than a function key or touchbar provide ...

i think the location of the touchbar above the useable space in the keyboard is a huge issue with it -- it's just not a useable space. it was hard to use function keys as well for this reason.

the touchbar would be kind of interesting for the creative uses i think if it was a separate physical device that you could put where you want it. a thing with a magnet maybe that you can attach to the bottom of the keyboard beneath the touchpad ... it's there when you are in an editing mentality and wanting to use those sliders -- relax and leave your fingers down close to you rather than raised and prone and stretching ...

I'm sure its 'less bad' now -- but here's an example of an absolutely horrendous security-bug-as-a consequence-of-design-deeply-baked-into-rails ... https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/13420

Interestingly -- the rails developers decided to put in a really horrendous hack to mitigate the common paths through which this design-flaw might lead to unexpected security outcomes ...

In a way, one could argue that the willingness to put in a horrendous hack to 'mitigate' a security flaw provides an example which demonstrates some amount of 'security reasonableness' in rails ...

In reality tho -- I think that this example serves as evidence more for the fact that rails is deeply flawed and very unlikely to be secure in practice -- for reasons of design complexity alone.

This is better than what I've been doing ...

But I find the experience of the cursor navigation by long-press on keyboard quite odd still ... if you stay in the mode for awhile -- and try sliding back and forth its quite an odd experience as it feels like the algorithm behind the cursor motion and its relationship to scrolling becomes less clear over time rather than more understood ...

Maybe there is something wrong with my touchscreen ... I can't figure out how to get the soft keyboard to scroll the cursor position reliably past the viewable area -- sometimes it does scroll and sometimes it doesn't and its a bit of a mystery to me what the intended motion input into the device is that will meet my desires ...

seems like maybe the panning speed needs to be proportional to the fingers vertical height in the keyboard or something -- no panning up top, and fast panning below

Url editing on iphone safari is highly messed up experience ... the text selection and editing behavior is just broken since ios 12 or 11 -- whichever one introduced the new text selection model ...

My standard easy repro -- go to a long url and try to edit the second to last segment of the url path (something which i do for work frequently when folks send me links to projects under development).

Enjoy the frustration.

This is not a javascript only phenomenon...

I regularly encounter code running off of performance cliffs like this in rails application i'm working on -- and it's incredibly difficult to climb the application out of these cliffs ...

A user configurable parameter for timeout would be a terrible language design mistake.

You would want as much as possible to make the timeout not based on runtime -- but on an abstract model of the computation which doesn't actually depend on any machine particular. "Hey your program didn't compile on my machine -- try a faster cpu" would be a nightmarish interaction.

You want constraints about how long these programs are allowed to execute to be tight enough for developers to learn a sense for what is reasonable to do with these features -- as opposed to waiting for runtime.

I think Deno will eventually replace node in mindshare and deployment numbers.

What percentage of nodejs packages run on both node and the browser and do you expect that number to go up or down over time?

If it goes up -- the percentage of node packages that run on deno also goes up.

Code that runs in the browser is very valuable because it is an incredibly widely deployed user eyeball platform ... the browser _is_ the center of the javascript ecosystem -- and so there is already built-in pressure to migrate from node to deno -- especially if/when deno's browser matching api implementations become part of the compatibility testing matrix for a major browser vendor (like chrome or firefox) ...

Deno will surf uphill on the ever rising value of browser compatibility until projects are actively weeding out any dependencies which "run only on node".

Even given the huge dependency graphs of node applications -- you don't really have to replace that many high level dependencies before you've migrated yourself to deno ... -- and you will experience incremental benefit for partial steps along the way as you do ...

my main reason for suggesting rust was to avoid the temptation to "solve the problem of the c++ build system ecosystem" which seems to be why catkin was created -- but i think this problem is basically intractable ...

Rust seems to me a reasonable language for developing the library of functionality that ROS offers -- with distribution and building and component development story all solved by the ecosystem default build mechanism ...

Every time I see ROS I have nightmare flashbacks to a project i worked on using it ...

I did not enjoy the cmake wrapper (catkin) -- and I bloody hate the garbage fire that is the python ecosystem ... someone needs to rebuild this project in rust -- could be a million times more plug and play and also better performance ... does something like that exist?

does ruby do anything like this? i'm new to ruby and could imagine something like this biting me ...

this is a ridiculous position. nothing substantive in the thread aside from "it's semi-possible to hack up a horrible subset of sql into some sort of api query language" -- with absolutely no reason why you'd want to do this ... (aside from maybe "familiarity" as an implicit reason)

if you want to directly expose your database -- you can use an abstraction that publishes a graphql api from your database schema. this is also suboptimal for a lot of reasons but it's very much a viable way to achieve the "same thing" as exposing a client side "sql as query language" interface would ...

there are a really large number of things i can no longer accomplish with ios 13 text selection model that i used to be able to do ... the easiest test case for finding all the flaws is trying to edit a url in safari.

ios 13 wants you to "grab" the text insertion cursor and drag it around -- but what are you supposed to do when the text cursor is not visible? and what are you supposed to do when an entire text region gets auto selected as in the url area ...

i would really love for someone to fix this issue

-- or if anyone knows how to do it ... here's the problem: say you have a long url that ends with a number -- and you want to change that number or select it to copy and paste it elsewhere. how do you do this on iphone in safari after ios 13?

chiropractors are snake oil salesman, pure and simple ... a lot of these clinics are fronts for religious organizations -- they figure out a way for their clergy to access the dollars in the medical system, and there is a virtuous cycle as people who are willing to believe in chiropractic care are also susceptible to other forms of faith based manipulation (in colorado you can get chiropractic services paid for by health insurance which ultimately means some of the money comes from the state).

I had back pain and tried it once -- didn't know anything about it before but i did it for a few weeks. i tend to have strong opinions about the role of the mind in body function which implies the brain does have significant effect on pain perception -- so i decided even tho there is absolutely no way the little tool they tap your back with 5 times in a session could do anything -- to see if i could pretend like it was helpful

... but when i noticed the anti vax material playing in the lobby -- i decided i'd had enough of the experiment and that these actively harmful belief systems didn't deserve any of my money ...

I'm a WeWork customer and I really like the service ... their financials I understand have been controversial for a number of years -- the service itself is great though!

To those that think the market response is likely to become predictable anytime soon — a thought experiment ... how do you think the markets will respond if Warren buffet dies of corona virus? Personally I think this kind of event could trigger a large change in the market (who knows why) and am curious what others think.

Does typescript support pnp somehow now? (That's actually the thing I'm wanting ...). npm's cli going away was an attempted tease (in bad-taste i think)

(Wishful thinking ...) Does this mean the next release of npm will be yarn v2 and that typescript will implement support for the pnp spec so we can converge the javascript packaging space to a sane place?

How do you assemble false positive false negative statistics for a new diagnostic in the presence of exponential growth ...?

Is this actually possible to do — my instincts say that any exponentially transmitting contagion will make it impossible to assess such stats with any confidence for quite some time ...

What percentage of bio defense funding will end up going into the bio-equivalent of pen testing and red teams ...? At some point some loon in power will chant “The best biodefense is a good biooffense” ...

Just skimmed the abstract — on a practical level — can this be used to better train a global ranking function given subsets of example ranked data?

Actually economically speaking — what reason is there to think that the total supportable size of an economy which operates with grid instability is smaller than one with perfect or nearly perfect grid predictability?

Maximizing value in a world with “power production weather” would be a valuable task from which rewards that aren’t necessarily obvious could be mined if the pursuit becomes incentivized on a larger scale.

Can you imagine how massive the field of software archeology will actually need to be to capture an understanding of the human experience of software development in the “distant past”.

Take any given product or system. what percentage of the software involved in implementing the system was written x years in the past. What’s gonna happen to that distribution in 10 or 100 years?

I wonder how inevitable it is that this percentage of ancient software in virtually every system will just keep growing and growing over time — until the systems of the future are tiny layers built on top of 1000 year old, impenetrable old growth forests which as well have been written by aliens for their understandability ...

I don’t hate slack but I’ll share my least favorite parts In the hope someone will see these good ideas and fix them

1. The rich text editor (thankfully you can turn it off — I am very sad for non savvy users who don’t know this)

2. The UX of snippets - I paste something long into a code fence — fine its too big and you need to send it very a different mechanism — just di that please don’t ask me and make me click around - ideally you’d see the big text blob inside the code snippets and just extract those into something the reader on the other side can click - this way I can provide exposition and give the reader the option to get more details if I’ve convinced them there’s something they should look at. Present options all require me to either lose formatting of my exposition or manually copy stuff out if the message and into one or more snippets

3. Link unfurling - yes I can turn it off for me but the readers not for readers on the other side ... they are less likely to engage properly with what I write because of this crap and I can’t fix it for them ... would be great if I can turn it off for messages I send and receive ...

I’ve really liked my wework space — recently I’ve started to see early signs of cost cutting ...

They’ve moved the cold brew downstairs so there is only one tap instead of two and replaced it with a much lower quality cold brew (the old one was extremely good — from a super high quality local source)... it’s small but feels like it’s probably the beginning of what is likely to be a long quality decline ...

The reality is — notebooks are and need to be developed as an app platform ...

In order to do notebooks properly — you need:

1. discovery (Ideally static discovery) of all the state the notebook needs, and the bulk of state the notebook will/could manipulate during its execution. Your container needs to intercept the filesystem and the networking apis that will be invoked so that a determination of the state that results from these operations can be observed by the runtime and shimmed appropriately for reproducibility and for performance optimization

2. The notebook (and the runtime inferred model of all the required inputs) needs to be repo stable — I Should be able to write a notebook app that reads from the file system on my development host, deploy it somewhere, and the runtime should take care that wherever that however that post deployment file system read is implemented matches my local development semantics

3. Pplatform level dependency graph needs to exist to model re-execution requirements automatically — incorporating code changes and external state

Apple could build this And “notebook-os” would be the correct conceptual framework for it ... anything less is always going to leave us severely wanting

Honestly I didn’t realize icloud backups were encrypted by a key Apple controls. I assumed they leveraged the same key sharing tech as iMessage ...

I’m turning off iCloud backup — the only reason I have it on actually is to turn off the annoying backup nags. My photos are in iCloud, and so are my messages - I actually can’t think of anything valuable outside of those that I’d actually need iCloud backup for ...

It doesn’t seem worth the risk

If this article went viral somehow and was able to drive crowds to the one “best” hike — then it would be actively bad for that hike ...

F# looks like a great language... A friend of mine who is a non-programmer DBA just reached out to me and asked about recommendations for learning .NET ...

I've not seen anything as elegant looking as F# in the .net world before ... What do people think ... -- is F# a good language for a beginner to learn which is also sufficiently well-supported that they could find themselves building useful script-like database (MSSQL) oriented utilities as early project ...?