Hacker News Reader

e3b0con Wapp – a single-file web framework by the creator of SQLite

I think that both languages for the large and for the small have their own places. Something optimized for the large-scale doesn't automatically work well for the small.

For example, I always feel that Tcl is better than Python for GDB scripting. At least, I really don't like typing parentheses in an interactive console. Also, there is no 'real' (read: general purpose) programming language that is able to beat BASH in terms of ergonomics, even though we all know BASH sucks when the program is getting large.

e3b0con Toxic management cost an award-winning game studio its best developers

I think this has something to do with the so-called Parkinson's law, where an organization tends to "corrupt" when it is growing its headcount if its top leader is not aware of it.

I used to work for a startup which has a 'flexible' working time culture too. It was not that bad until the company grew its size to an extent that the middle management layer was established. Then all the shit exactly like what a typical Parkinson's law story happened.

Edit: https://www.economist.com/node/14116121

e3b0con How the West Got China Wrong

China's economic success began with the transition to market economy, not the other way around.

Edit: Also, China is a very capitalist country compared with, say, EU.

e3b0con Europe’s central banks are starting to replace dollar reserves with the yuan

I think people have to understand the origin of the dollar reserves before imagining the implication. In the cases of Chinese and Japan (and most other export-oriented economies), the accumulations of dollar reserves are the by-product of the exchange rate manipulations, which are to make their currencies undervalued to maintain the export competitiveness.

The US dollar has been the 'target' of such exchange rate manipulation is mostly because of its role as the largest import economy. As a result, if China becomes the next big importer, other export-oriented countries will probably do the same trick like it has been doing to the US.

e3b0con Luna 1.0 Beta is out

This looks very cool.

It would be interesting if we can construct software with a UI like this but based on an SSA IR or downright CPU instructions instead of another high-level language.

e3b0con Why I love Go

Interestingly it makes me a better programmer after being used to the Go style. Now I don't allow unused headers/variables in my C/C++ code and feel natural to check every return error. 'Optional' warnings don't happen anymore either since -Werror feels familiar. Overall my C/C++ code becomes more reliable and easier to debug.

e3b0con Bitcoin ‘Ought to Be Outlawed,’ Nobel Prize Winner Stiglitz Says

> Monetary inflation allows governments to tax you by stealth.

It's even worth since rich people can easily exempt from it by allocating their wealth into inflation-proof assets while working class have to take a full exposure of it.

e3b0con An Open Letter to Intel

I've once heard that companies don't like GPL is not because they're afraid of being taken advantage of by their competitors, but they have some secret workarounds/fixes for the hardware defects, which would make them trouble if discovered by their customers.

e3b0con G.E.R.T: Golang Embedded Run-Time

My guess is it can be managed by something similar to the concept of critical sections. That is, GC is disabled in the critical sections and is only enabled explicitly by the programmer. That's like how the pauses caused by hardware interrupts are prevented in kernel/driver programming. After all, you won't like heap allocation/deallocation in the hot-path no matter what language is used, be it GCed or not.

e3b0con Simplicity: A New Language for Blockchains [pdf]

They sought to promote themselves to the managerial/business roles that no longer required to write much code. That makes them less involved with the development, not the other way around. I don't think the reason for them to start a business is because someone else urges them to stop writing code for bitcoin.

e3b0con Go: Ten years and climbing

Then I am curious about what makes RLS or the alike so hard to onboard? Common IDE features like reliable and responsive "jump to definition", "Find all references" and "Renaming symbols" are 90% of all I would ask for. Do Rust devs have less attention to the area?

e3b0con Go: Ten years and climbing

But given the reality I observe, Go has already the top-tier tooling regarding IDE support and we are still waiting for the first production-ready RLS. Not that Go has the fanciest IDE products in the market or those tools have been invested heavily for Go, but it is obvious to me that such tools are abundant in the Go ecosystem that can be readily employed by every editor vendor. To put it in an ironic way, assuming same popularity, I think a quality language tool for Rust has more potential to be monetized (just like those for C++) than those for Go, because the former has much higher barrier to entry and hence less competitors.

e3b0con California Today: A Spreading ‘Yimby’ Movement

If you replace the property tax with an LVT, the problem could be solved already. Lower property tax encourages developments and renewals. Higher land tax incentives efficient use of land and somehow makes yimby a more attractive option.

e3b0con Toward Go 2

Sounds like https://github.com/golang/go/issues/19335

I guess the performance issue has something to do with some missing optimizations. Hopefully it will get better.

Edit: Also https://github.com/golang/go/issues/19361

e3b0con DeepMind in “very early stage” talks with National Grid to reduce UK energy use

Not an expert but I expect that what AI/machine learning/NN shines is the ability to produce very high quality solutions (or approximations) for large-scale NP-hard problems. With regard to the "NP-hard" part, I don't think regular data science can be a sufficient substitute.

e3b0con The JVM is not that heavy

We have similar experiences as well.

  $ ps -eo rss,cmd,user | grep jenkins
  4928228 /usr/bin/java -Djava.awt.he jenkins

  $ ps -eo rss,cmd,user | grep drone
  12940 /drone agent                root
  19924 /drone server               root

We run the two applications in the same machine. Admittedly Jenkins is much feature-rich but we only use its vanilla settings without whatever fancy plugins for a few legacy SVN repos.

P.S. The Drone server and agent are running within docker containers.

e3b0con Getting Past C

Rust has some very desirable properties to me. Writing Rust programs from scratch is not as scary as I've heard of from the internet either. The documentation is excellent, the compiler diagnostic messages are very helpful and the notorious borrow checker didn't stand in my way that much. And I love Cargo and Cargo.io. I have some projects where Rust is the saner choice than Go or other GC based languages.

That said, there are actually drawbacks of Rust compared with Go, IMHO. When facing a moderately large project written by others, the ergonomics for diving into the project is not as smooth as Go. There is no good full-source code indexer like cscope/GNU Global/Guru for symbol navigation across multiple dependent projects. Full text searching with grep/ack does not fill the gap well either since many symbols, with their different scopes/paths, are allowed to have the same identifier without explicitly specifying the full path. That makes troubleshooting/tracing a large, unfamiliar codebase quite daunting compared with Go.

e3b0con Gitea – A community-managed fork of Gogs

As it is a fork of Gogs and Gogs haven't progressed too much since then, You can have a look at the commit log to have a rough impression about what have been improved. Last time I checked it had about 400~ more commits, which were mostly bug fixes.

e3b0con Register-based VMs have a higher performance than stack-based VMs

http://fpgacpu.ca/stack/Second-Generation_Stack_Computer_Arc...

The article has detailed discussions about the topic.

e3b0con Piketty’s rising share of capital income and the US housing market

In the long run, this seems to be partly due to Henry George theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem). Otherwise real estate wouldn't be that exceptional than other asset classes, as the article suggests.

e3b0con Bounds Check Elimination (BCE) in Golang 1.7

I don't think bounds checking can be done at compile-time, especially in C/C++.

e3b0con Go’s march to low-latency GC

One thing that is very helpful is that you can navigate the code in your editor using the exceptionally effective code navigation tool for Go. With the tool one can very easily and precisely jump to the definitions and references without building an index beforehand.

e3b0con D-Link publishes code-signing private keys by mistake

Then what's the purpose of signing in the first place?

The keys for official releases are supposed to be kept by a trustworthy senior management or some people with highly restricted privilege. Also the software/firmware shipping process must be well audited if there are serious (not just pretending to be) security requirements. The keys should not be exposed to a random technician or a new hire who can possibly responsible for destroying your and your clients' businesses. It looks like they didn't have a quite "formal" shipping flow at least in this case.

e3b0con Go GC: Prioritizing low latency and simplicity

"The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry." (Henry Petroski)

e3b0con Your Job as a Founder Is to Create Believers

In my point of view, founders who believe that kind of "tactics" send me the message that they, either unconsciously or consciously, believe the people they hire are intellectually inferior than themselves. It's like they don't expect a fair and mutual beneficial transaction with their business counter-parties. I would personally take that as an insult if they treat me with that.

Let alone a company always hiring people dumber than its founder couldn't be doing too well.

e3b0con Hawaii Bans Non-Compete and Non-Solicit Clauses in High-Tech Employment

There are companies which love all-around workers who can pick up all shits tossed from anyone. You will have to deal with everything from setting up a website to debugging a Windows device driver, and probably fixing a motor fan occasionally. They will tell you that can contribute to your value as an employee and help your job prospects. But the truth is the management does not have the skill and interest in task division. All they can do is sort of 'people skill' to make you voluntarily stay overtime and get the shit done ASAP.

I would rather not having that kind of job prospects.

e3b0con Announcing GitHub Japan

Because enough(or potentially enough) businesses are willing to pay for their technical support?

e3b0con NYSE launches a Bitcoin index

Will 2/3 difficulty guarantee more than twice revenue?

e3b0con Why Billionaires Don't Pay Property Taxes in New York

To mitigate the political frictions, LVT should probably be bundled with principal residence deduction(or exemption).

e3b0con Why Billionaires Don't Pay Property Taxes in New York

Land value tax + principal residence deduction can solve both the economic and political problems.

By the way, property tax and land value tax are different. Land value tax is superior than the other.