cbdumas

I think you're right about perceived barriers to entry, and I certainly didn't say (nor did I mean to imply) that anyone should "just" learn to code. But I think the promise of "apps without code" is a siren song, always ending in frustration.

I'd never tell anyone that learning to code is easy (only that most people can do it with some hard work), but I would also never tell anyone that tools like this will make it easier because I do not believe that to be true.

I think the thing that "coding without code" fundamentally misses is that learning to actually write Python or Java or whatever is not the hard part of being productive in a business context. The hard part of creating useful software is that you have to understand a business process and its requirements so precisely that you can write it down for the computer to do.

I work with business stakeholders creating internal line of business apps a lot, and most of the time the requirements that they are able to articulate are some variation of vague, ill-specified, and flat out wrong. And it's not their fault at all, it's just that unless you've gone through the process of writing code it's impossible to understand just how pedantic and explicit you need to be when building software versus, say, giving your human colleagues instructions.

And by the time you've got enough experience to be able to do that, tools like this just get in the way compared to writing some Python or SQL or C# or what have you.

I may be missing something here but the example given of finding the midpoint between to points across the antimeridian seems at best misleading. The formula given, averaging each coordinate, does not work for spherical coordinates as this post demonstrates. And the correct formula for doing so is never given.

I'm not an expert by any means, but I believe that at this point there is some evidence that online communities actually do exactly the opposite.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01925121176921...

https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits-contro...

My experience has been very different, rust-analyzer works seamlessly in my VSCode environment, even moving from the remote WSL plugin to the remote SSH plugin. I've had zero issues with it, and it feels truly magical, when I first installed it and saw what it could do (and how fast it it) I was actually blown away. I really can't overstate how great it has been.

I can't speak to your experiences obviously, but based on mine I would recommend that anyone on VSCode gives it a shot immediately.

> This is a limitation we ran into trying to implement a critical accounting ledger on top of DynamoDB.

Sounds like a perfect use case for a traditional RDBMS. Why Dynamo?

> At worst you are maintaining an old monolith trying to figure out someones logic from 15 years ago.

Can you imagine what it will be like 15 years from now, when we're trying to maintain someone's microservices with their logic smeared out across dozens of distributed API calls, storage backends, and code bases?

> Trying to draw conclusions on the relative safety of a grocery store employee versus the general public from that number is crazy.

That's exactly what the Washington Post article is doing.

> Just close up shop entirely and go to deliveries / curbside pickup

Existing grocery delivery services are already way overburdened, and desperately scaling up[1].

> risk their lives for your oreos.

You can't possibly think that going to the grocery store is so frivolous and unnecessary, as this statement would imply. Or do you?

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

I have only played around with it, but to me the possibility of using a language other than JS to write web apps is really exciting. I don't hate JavaScript by any means, I've used it professionally off and on for years, but it still frustrates me that for webapps you're basically forced to use it.

This is speculation, but I believe this is a vestige of when voice chat applications widely used by PC gamers like TeamSpeak and Ventrilo did actually rely on independent servers, usually paid for and administered by individuals (or guilds/clans).

Back in the bad old days if you wanted to voice chat you had to know someone who could invite you to join a "server" (or set one up yourself), and I think the verbiage just kind of stuck.

I'm not sure if it's a mistake or just some cheeky humor but the "Known Limitations" link on their Docs page returns a 404.

I love a minimal, text-only website as much as the next crotchety HN reader, but a little bit of CSS goes a very long way in terms of readability.

Edit: Upon further inspection I see that this page was designed to be hard to read. Very curious.

I couldn't agree more with this, it's very frustrating. I recently worked through most of the "make a lisp" guide [0], and it was excellent introduction to a simple lisp interpreter. But now I want to try my hand at a compiler (either producing machine code or maybe custom VM bytecode) and the lack of resources for that is bewildering. Just as you say, I've found that most online texts on compilers seem to spend most of their time on parsing, which is something I already feel relatively comfortable with.

Does anyone know of a good resource on how to transform an AST to machine code? I've skimmed Crafting Interpreters and the Bytecode VM section seems to spend an inexplicable amount of time on not only parsing, but minutia having nothing to do with compilers (e.g. writing a custom dynamic array implementation in C).

[0] https://github.com/kanaka/mal/blob/master/process/guide.md

I disagree, a system implemented at the language level this way can in principle provide far stronger security guarantees than a typical operating system. Security issues can still come up obviously but they could essentially be isolated to the language runtime.

"Shopping" on Amazon.com is not a good strategy IMO. It's always best to find something you want on another, more specialized site (forum, review aggregator, specialized review site, etc.) and then look for the item you want somewhere online. Amazon, walmart, alibaba et al. are more like UI's for a warehouse for me at this point.

This seems like a roundabout way of getting to something much more like what wikipedia calls a "Language-based System"[1], which is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Very cool.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-based_system

Yep if you click through to the article they linked that's exactly what it says.

The only clear moral breach I can find in this article is the questionable assertions of Ring cameras reducing crime. This is definitely wrong if Ring does not have any evidence of the truth of these claims and they should stop doing that.

Everything else, to me, can be boiled down to the fact that the author is uncomfortable with the tradeoffs people are making between privacy and security. The author engages with this point only in passing, at the very end of the piece: "But for ordinary people, like those in Northwest Baltimore, the reason for trusting Ring is simple: they are scared. Pastor Moore said that he understands concerns that people have about Ring’s use of data. However, he said his community didn’t share these concerns."

I think you might be right in this case that practical use preceded theoretical understanding but that's not really my point. Software development certainly has examples of pseudo-math (for example there was a trend a few years back to write JavaScript that could run on both the server and the client. For reasons passing understanding, this was called "isomorphic" by some practitioners). All I meant was that ADTs are not that.

While I don't know the history of the term "algebraic data type", I do know that the algebraic structure of ADTs is much deeper than what this article presented. For instance this structure supports some limited notion of a derivative[1]! And purely algebraic manipulation of ADT "equations" can actually be used to generate some non-obvious results [2]. So I think it's probably wrong to say that ADTs were just "given a name that sounds mathematical".

1. https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/three/algebra-and-calcu... 2. http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/~ablass/7trees.pdf

There are some algorithms that are trivial to implement with Geohashes that are non-trivial with lat-long coordinates. For example, given a set of n points find the k nearest neighbors. To do this with geohash you maintain an ordered list of geohashes, and find k points adjacent in the list. Doing this efficiently with lat-long requires some relatively exotic data structures like an R-tree or k-d-tree.

Really? I've seen touch screen ordering at McDonalds all over the place and most people seem to have no problem with it. Why do you think people avoid it?

Uber's position here seems to be that they are a technology company that connects drivers with things that need to be driven from A to B (people, restaurant orders, etc.). Not sure I buy that but it sounds like they're willing to ask the courts to decide on that if this goes into law.

> Physical media is for when you want to really enjoy the music.

Wow this is some condescending, pretentious nonsense. Also, every streaming service I've ever used is perfectly capable of playing an album in order.

I think the idea is that because there is money going out the door in a buyback, rational investors should value the stock that much lower. And this lowered valuation should balance exactly with the price increase due to increased demand. Not sure it works out like that in practice though.

I've recently begun running into internal facing web apps that only work in Chrome :(

I mean also the fact that the browser most people used at that time was bad may have been a factor. Chrome was a noticeable step up from IE.

This looks like a public facing version of a tool that AWS uses internally, which is great. Super easy tool to setup and govern AWS accounts, and also access the accounts to which you have access. I always wondered why they didn't sell it to their customers but I guess now they will!

I wish more places would do this not for meetings but for meeting rooms. Meeting rooms in some orgs are a huge pain to get, which actually leads to a negative feedback cycle of people booking them far in advance "just in case" and then not using them.