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da39a3eeon Design Pressure: The Invisible Hand That Shapes Your Code

I'm not sure I'd take design advice from someone who thought attr.ib and attr.s were a good idea. On the other hand he points out that DDD is a vacuous cult, which is true.

da39a3eeon I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs

I think that to understand the diversity of opinions, we have to recognize a few different categories of users:

Category 1: people who don't like to admit that anything trendy can also be good at what it does.

Category 2: people who don't like to admit that anything made by for-profit tech companies can also be good at what it does.

Category 3: people who don't like to admit that anything can write code better than them.

Category 4: people who don't like to admit that anything which may be put people out of work who didn't deserve to be put out of work, and who already earn less than the people creating the thing, can also be good at what it does

Category 5: people who aren't using llms for things they are good at

Category 6: people who can't bring themselves to communicate with AIs with any degree of humility

Category 7: people to whom none of the above applies

da39a3eeon New book-sorting algorithm almost reaches perfection

>> Do you have a reference where I can learn about this?

> I don't really understand what you're asking for.

That comes across as rude and condescending; please don't communicate like that. Your English skills seem OK but in case you still need help, they're asking for a "reference" -- that's an online source of some sort probably, where they can "learn about" it -- that means that the reference would contain content helping them to understand the topic better. For example, the helpful content you gave after your rude and condescending initial comment would be an example of such content.

da39a3eeon Okay, I Like WezTerm

To be fair the Alacritty author is also really abrasive and unsympathetic to users.

da39a3eeon The Battle to Define Mental Illness (2010)

  No escape from the mass mind rape
  Play it again Jack and then rewind the tape
  And then play it again and again and again
  Until your mind is locked in
  Believin' all the lies that they're tellin' ya
  Buyin' all the products that they're sellin' ya
  They say, "Jump" and you say, "How high?"
  You brain-dead, you got a fuckin' bullet in your head

da39a3eeon I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals

This is literally the least interesting thread I have ever seen on HN. Man complains about other people doing thing related to his hobby.

da39a3eeon If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?

One thing that bothers me is when people refer to languages like Go and Rust as "not object-oriented". Of course they are object oriented; Go and Rust programs consist of struct definitions to which you associate methods, giving rise to individually instantiatable objects with custom behavior, and you use these objects to model entities in your problem domain. This is object-orientation.

Where they differ from OO languages such as Java and Python is of course that they avoid traditional inheritance, offering more restricted inheritance-adjacent features (typeclasses/traits/interfaces and struct embedding).

Like many others I find Go disappointing in many regards. (Although Go's channels, goroutines, select, and implicit interfaces are beautiful). One disappointment is the way that methods are not indented or nested within the struct definition/interface that they are defined on. This is, IMO, a silly fig-leaf that is attempting to make the language look "not OO" in a superficial manner, but all it ends up doing is making it hard to see where your implementation of one interface ends and another starts.

da39a3eeon AI and the Problem of Knowledge Collapse

OK. For reference, I was an Emacs user for 20 years, and participated heavily in emacs extension development. I used to think like you early on. But, especially if you use languages with expressive/complex type systems, having the editor be able to inform you about types is very useful. So I understand where you're coming from, but you're probably being too absolutist and are upholding preferences that you should re-examine. For example, it's basically silly to write Rust without using rust-analyzer. I agree that feedback can be a distraction while typing but it should be possible to tune your IDE editor to not display anything until a specified amount of time has passed with no keypresses.

da39a3eeon AI and the Problem of Knowledge Collapse

Can you give more details regarding what IDE features you have in mind? I agree that java/c# people not knowing how to use the command line is bad (because they only know how to click "build project" etc) but IDE features such as LSP, compiler error messages as you type, intelligent completion, variable renaming, etc I think are essential tools.

da39a3eeon 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza

I can't read the news because it's so upsetting to watch the world allow a naked genocide, or discuss it with my family. The 7 Nov terrorist attack was disgusting, and since then Israel has proved to the entire world, beyond anyone's remaining doubt,that they are a disgusting nation.

da39a3eeon Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel (2020)

I often find myself wanting a way to easily see which variables are local to a closure body versus those that are captured.

(I use VSCode in case anyone knows a way to do it in any language)

da39a3eeon Best engineering interview question I've gotten

Pick carefully.

da39a3eeon A proposal to add signals to JavaScript

This article is missing a "What are signals" section. And yes, this does not do the job:

> Within JS frameworks and libraries, there has been a large amount of experimentation across different ways to represent this binding, and experience has shown the power of one-way data flow in conjunction with a first-class data type representing a cell of state or computation derived from other data, now often called "Signals".

da39a3eeon For Brilliant Color: Packaging the First LSD Blotter

Agreed. It's annoyingly hard to come across though for me, and for most people I'd imagine.

da39a3eeon Best engineering interview question I've gotten

You sound really full of yourself and entitled. A job should last several years, why not spend half a day applying? You don't sound like you really want a new job anyway, but maybe try to put yourself in the shoes of people who do, or who actually _need_ a job.

da39a3eeon Regex character "$" doesn't mean "end-of-string"

You don't have to be an expert; you should very rarely be using regexes so complex that you can't understand them.

da39a3eeon PostgreSQL is eating the database world

Small thing but postgres should deprecate the names it uses for the CLI commands like "adduser" "createuser" etc; they should have a prefix like "pg-adduser" or more modern, be subcommands of a single "pg" or "pgctl" command. Has there been a move toward that yet?

da39a3eeon Terminal Latency

I have literally no idea why people care so much about typing latency. If you type that fast, I suggest that you seriously consider finding a more intellectually challenging task.

da39a3eeon Show HN: Interactive Smartlog VSCode Extension – An Interactive Git GUI

Just saying something isn't open source isn't a valid criticism, and it's not an interesting contribution to HN. You could say the same about any software at all that's not open source; it has no positive contribution to the discussion of this piece of software.

da39a3eeon Optimizing technical docs for LLMs

It can go too far. Too many section headings and it becomes unreadable, like an undergraduate textbook where you're constantly being distracted by sections and boxes.

da39a3eeon Bython: Python with braces. Because Python is awesome, but whitespace is awful

People who don't like significant whitespace are just people who don't use a proper text editor / IDE. A lot of them think you have to manually insert the whitespace. It's the same with people who complain about parentheses in lisp.

da39a3eeon Optimizing technical docs for LLMs

Presumably all the structure and section headings that they recommend don't have to be rendered by a browser as visible to humans. The LLMs should be smart enough to understand HTML directives that don't add a lot of unnecessary visual structure.

da39a3eeon First known photos of 'lost bird' captured by scientists

Actually, no, I have a PhD, and postdoc in this area. You, on the other hand, have read too much pop science about epigenetics. Surely you know that what sells pop science is novelty, so claiming that "Darwin was wrong because epigenetics" is a great commercial strategy. Sounds like it worked on you?

da39a3eeon First known photos of 'lost bird' captured by scientists

Nice try but that argument doesn't work: predicted speed of change to planet under climate change is much much greater than under previously seen natural changes to habitats.

da39a3eeon First known photos of 'lost bird' captured by scientists

The obsession with climate change has produced a generation who think that any tree species is ok if it replenishes carbon. People who don't understand that some natural habitats are incomparably more important for birds than secondary forest and reforestation efforts.

da39a3eeon First known photos of 'lost bird' captured by scientists

A bit, yes. But it's perfectly possible to destroy a bird's breeding habitat without affecting global climate. The focus should be on the species we share the planet with and preventing their extinction. Planetary atmospheric issues are not what nature conservation is about.

da39a3eeon First known photos of 'lost bird' captured by scientists

Endemic to X means that it's geographical distribution is confined to X. The (original) geographical distribution of basically all bird species is fairly well known, due to the efforts of 19th and 20th century scientists and their collection of museum specimens. The reference work here is the "Peters check list", completed over the course of several decades in the 20C by various ornithologists.

Of course, you have to check when they say "species" whether they're referring to a subspecies "elevated to species status" by dodgy "phylogeography" genetics studies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_L._Peters

da39a3eeon First known photos of 'lost bird' captured by scientists

Ornithologists always use mist nets to survey birds. They are very widely used and rarely harm the birds when used by people who've learned how to use them. Their possession is controlled in the sorts of countries with legal systems that specify first world stuff like that.

da39a3eeon Learning Theory from First Principles [pdf]

I'm not talking about this specific subject.

da39a3eeon Learning Theory from First Principles [pdf]

In more advanced undergraduate math, PDF lecture notes written by professors but not published in book form often contain excellent explanations and proofs that are not available in books. Also, making undergraduate buy expensive text books is more of a thing in first year American classes. Look at the lecture notes at Oxford for example.

https://courses.maths.ox.ac.uk/