Hacker News Reader

dasmothon Raising of Chicago

That’s pretty much what the “past” link gives you. I like the human touch of someone consciously deciding whether there’s value in highlighting previous posts.

dasmothon One Windows Kernel

At the time this switchover was happening, I remember being pretty excited about things like protected memory. But in retrospect, I think it’s a shame there hasn’t really been a continuation of the “monitor” type interface. I could imagine them winning at things like minimising latency when responding to user input.

dasmothon Not Lisp again (2009)

It’s set in 1983. “Common LISP The Language” was published in 1984.

(The ANSI standard was 1994. Still nowhere near 20 years).

dasmothon Ask HN: How do I stop being resentful towards other devs

I think I'd probably phrase it as "many programmers like to feel some degree of ownership".

dasmothon Ask HN: Are there any alternatives to basic income?

Agree 100% (hence my “rather depressing”). The advocates are definitely out there, though.

dasmothon Labor Supply and the Attention Tax

I’d argue that the “work is good in and of itself” idea is quite prevalent on the left too. You can certainly find left-wing advocates of “job guarantee”-type setups.

dasmothon Ask HN: Are there any alternatives to basic income?

Some would argue that Job Guarantees could perform a similar function. Personally find them a rather depressing idea, but you’ll find plenty of arguments for and against.

dasmothon Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented (2002)

I don't think making a hash table of closures is necessarily equivalent to "object orientation". Sure, if you use a set of well-known keys to represent an interface, then it's headed that way. But the same structure can be used for other things, e.g. a table of opaque IDs to closures encapsulating a possible "next step" through a workflow in an interactive program. Indeed, I think the original news.arc did exactly that in many places (and contemporary Hacker News still does somewhat?).

(My reading of the "wimpier languages" bit was that it was probably a dig at Java, where [prior to Java 8], you had to explicitly write an inner class to emulate a closure...)

dasmothon Ask HN: What's your favorite technical book?

"The Little Schemer" series ("Reasoned Schemer" was actually my first, but the whole series seems great. Must order the dependent types volume...)

dasmothon Facebook hires Nick Clegg as head of global affairs

Non-paywall article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/19/facebook-...

dasmothon Idleness as Flourishing

Gardening is a great way to escape distractions, especially if your main problem is electronic distractions. Even if you’ve got a smartphone in your pocket, muddy and/or gloved hands are a good deterrent to “let’s quickly check ...”

dasmothon Ask HN: Is there a modern “power on to basic” computer, for kids to learn on?

I’m absolutely convinced that typing stuff in — carefully! — from magazines or books was one of the most productive bits of my early experiments with a computer (BBC in my case). I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks this — for example, the “hard way” books seem to by trying to re-create this experience [1]. Spending some time typing code gives it a chance to percolate in a way that quickly glancing at it before “click to run” doesn’t.

[1] https://learnpythonthehardway.org/python3/intro.html

dasmothon Do We Worship Complexity?

Clearly, the complexity of modern-ish CPUs does push up instructions/cycle — and thus single-threaded performance. That said, I did an awful lot on machines running at hundreds, rather than thousands, of MIPS (and quite a bit at single digits...). If the “big core” superscalar designs hadn’t happened, it’s not at all clear to me that the world would be a worse place. Perhaps we’d have more transputer-like designs, for instance (which I admit bring their own complexity — but could at least be rather more transparent than the current mess of speculation and complex cache hierarchies.)

dasmothon Ask HN: Is there a modern “power on to basic” computer, for kids to learn on?

At a technical level, JSFiddle or equivalent comes kind-of close. Set up a template with a nice big <canvas> element, then you've got a simple imperative API to draw stuff which really does come pretty close to what you'd get from a BASIC> prompt.

That said, I wonder if it's even possible to replicate the C64 (or equivalent) experience. Looking back, I think a big part of the "magic" was that there were relatively few distractions. Just you, the machine, and (maybe) some paper documentation or a magazine with a few listings [1]. Can that be replicated once you're used to network-connected computers that are gateways to almost unlimited amounts of video, colourful games, etc.?

(My child is getting to the point where I wish I knew the answers to some of this myself...)

[1] I'm pretty certain type-in listings were the biggest contributor to my learning, early on. That doesn't seem to be something that comes up terribly often nowadays (although I note that Zed Shaw's "Learn Python the Hard Way" is pretty specific about telling you to hand-type in the examples...)

dasmothon Alternative code styles

Cyclomatic complexity seems like a great example of Goodhart's Law [1]. I absolutely agree that on the whole, code with fewer paths tends to be easier to read. However, taking deeply nested code and arbitrarily pulling chunks of it out into functions which only have a single caller and don't really abstract anything that's ever going to be terribly meaningful on its own seldom makes it better in my experience -- and can force a lot of skipping around if you're actually trying to understand what the system as a whole is trying to do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

dasmothon Ask HN: What are you favorite tiny tools?

https://linux.die.net/man/1/paste

dasmothon Ask HN: What are you favorite tiny tools?

"paste" -- an unexpectedly useful data-wrangling tool. I used a hand-rolled version for years before discovering it was available "as standard".

dasmothon Why open office design makes people less productive

I had a private office a couple of times in academia. Not uncommon (although the open plan trend has been showing up there, too).

The private sector does seem to have embraced the bullpen pretty thoroughly...

dasmothon Why open office design makes people less productive

Or even more so: the Panopticon (in its original sense)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

dasmothon Ask HN: How did you get introduced to HN?

I think there must have been a link, or at least a sufficiently-intriguing mention, in one of Paul Graham's essays. I'd been reading those because they showed up in LISP blog aggregators.

dasmothon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (October 2018)

SEEKING WORK | Full-stack Developer and Data Wrangler

Location: Southern UK.

Remote: Yes.

Portfolio / Contact: https://tad.me.uk/

I build data-intensive applications with a particular focus on visual front-ends. Bioinformatics and Genomics are where I have the greatest domain expertise, but a lot of the ideas are much more general. Technologies of choice include Javascript, React and Clojure.

dasmothon Atlassian's new terms forbid benchmarking

This is knowledge that could come in handy one day, so thanks.

But fine-grained permissions are a fairly regularly cited reason for using Atlassian’s stuff over other (simpler...) offerings. This sounds a lot like “don’t try the fancy stuff because it’s unusably slow”.

dasmothon Questions

Perhaps if great interactive development and debugging tools were more pervasive, there would be less demand for lots of tests written at the same time as the actual function.

(The fine-grained "unit" stuff, anyway. System/integration tests come with different trade-offs).

dasmothon Questions

I agree regarding the symptoms, but am less convinced that run-time efficiency is the sole (or perhaps even major) cause. If it were, I'd argue that we'd see less usage of, e.g., Python.

I don't know the true cause -- I wish I did. But I do do see a trend towards an ever more "hands-off" style of software development: large volumes of automated (especially unit) tests in preference to interactive approaches (or hybrids, like running subsets of tests via a REPL), and running test instances on remote servers (often via extra layers of indirection, such as CI servers) rather than running on your own machine. I'd love to see a resurgence of interactivity, but if anything it seems to be going against recent trends.

Edit: The subjective impression I've got is that doing things the indirect, hands-off way is being presented as somehow more "professional" while hands-on interactivity is the realm of the self-taught and hackers. Do others see this? What can be done to change these perceptions?

dasmothon Questions

It’s a good question, but there are counter-examples too (Bill Gates, arguably Elon Musk) and I’d argue that these get more attention and praise — so on the whole things may not be too badly out of kilter.

dasmothon New Standard Deal

This is one of those cases where the word “average” is kind-of unhelpful. Mean? Mode? Median?

dasmothon Ask HN: What's a good history of technology book?

John D. Clark's "Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants" is back in print as of a few months ago, and pretty readable overall (but does venture into some of the less travelled corners of chemistry as well...)

For computer stuff, Tracey Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" is one of my favourites.

dasmothon SEC Sues Musk and Seeks Ban for His Tweets on Go-Private Deal

Jeff Bezos has more money and can speed things up if he wants.

The first part is obviously true. The latter, I’m not so sure —- Blue’s budget has increased dramatically over the past few years, but New Glenn flights remain rare, and New Shepard remains well in the future.

It’s interesting to ponder where Blue would have gone if SpaceX (which was founded later) hadn’t happened. I think there’s a very real chance they’d still be thrashing, talking up bits and pieces of technology but without any complete vehicles (even of New Glenn size).

dasmothon ARM Assembly Is Too High Level: ROR and RRX

If you're looking for a reasonably readable summary, there was a fair amount on Raymond Chen's blog recently. Part one (of about 15 IIRC) here:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180806-00/?p=...

dasmothon Ask HN: Night owl, health, and career options

I'm not a night owl in the sense you are, but still find the idea of fixed 9-5-style hours pretty frustrating (in particular, because they make it hard to get much outdoors time in the winter months).

You don't say what field you work in but I'm guessing something technical. Have you looked into freelancing at all? Depending on your location, remote work for someone a few timezones to your west might also be something to look into.