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hyperpallium

4,743 karma · joined February 26, 2015

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hyperpallium··on Oracle's history highlights a possible downside to its stance on API copyrights
I believe there were lawsuits over IBM clones, way back when, amd the clones won, based on interoperability. Apis are software, not hardware, but you'd expect this to be the same, because of the same underlying policy considerations.

Sometimes courts uphold the letter of the law, but say the legislature should change it.

hyperpallium··on MessagePack: like JSON, but fast and small
funPOV: Text is a binary format. Just standard, with tooling.
hyperpallium··on Do whatever you can't stop thinking about
Problems with talking to people: (1) can't communicate it properly (2) too few people to hit one who loves it

What worked for me: make an absolutely minimal version of the idea (2 hours), and a webpage that describes its promise (9 hours). 500 people looked at it, one thought it was cool - that was enough for me.

hyperpallium··on Google tracking a bike ride past a burglarized home made the rider a suspect
There's a simple solution to ubiquitous surveillance: conform.

Don't do anything out of the ordinary. Do exactly what everyone does, and you won't get hurt. If you enjoy exploring and experimenting, discovering and inventing, creating and wondering, you'll need to train yourself out of that, because thoughts lead to actions.

Think Same.

hyperpallium··on Not being an asshole will make you more money
I had a famous company redline many minor changes that we had discussed, but in amongst it, they redlined a major change we hadn't discussed. They said, *we redlined it, you saw it, what's the big deal?" But I wouldn't deal with them after that.
hyperpallium··on Companies fret as costs soar for software subscriptions (2019)
Alternatives make it safer for buyers, maybe Sun's model: open spec, free reference implementation, and commercial version.
hyperpallium··on Neanderthals Traversed Vast Distances
Carrying capacity and land bridges (excepting far-later Polynesians), AOHS.

But we're ridiculously adaptable, tropic to artic.

hyperpallium··on New Features in Java 14
It's just better error messages (where within expression, not just which line).
hyperpallium··on Donald Knuth was framed
> How can average programmers write code that is sufficiently abstract that it hides the complexity they can't handle?

Well said.

Hiding complexity is harder than handling it. Designing an effective way to expose it for use amounts to (part of) a "programming system" [Brooks].

So it's library writers who hide the complexity for average programmers, with a "programming product": stdlib, open source project or (rarer these days) commercial "engine".

When there is no such library, we get the current state of our art: many projects failing.

hyperpallium··on Donald Knuth was framed
Modularity incurs a complexity tax. If you are smart enough to keep it all in your head, like a Motie Engineer, you can simplify by omitting it. But if you're not...
hyperpallium··on Ancient Roman Valves (2013)
Amazing! Lead is unfortunately malleable.

In 2000 years, they may say it of "plastic".

hyperpallium··on Ancient Roman Valves (2013)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Valves
hyperpallium··on Myst: the Drawbacks to Success
Like a demo-tape, a great game could be picked up (like Portal was). Why wouldn't Sony do this?

A distributable runtime, to a market of 100,000,000+ PS4 (plus PS5's), royalties to creators as publishers, would be an intermediate step.

Bundled with PS5 for early gen content.

hyperpallium··on Year Without a Summer
Carrying capacity is the natural limit on all life.

Lower birth rates (due to birth control, affluence) is the fundamental change.

hyperpallium··on Brace yourself, I’m in an expansive mood (2019)
Actually, the first one does need the g, should be

  mv topo{log,graph}ical.data
It works because it expands to

  mv topological.data topographical.data
try it with echo instead of mv to see how it expands. Other uses:

  mv myfile.txt{,.tmp}   # add extension
  mv mymusic.{mp3,mp4}   # change extension
  mv myarchive.{zip,jar}
hyperpallium··on A video game that lets you make video games
Very fertile ground for 2-3 years, due to game-scarcity.

It's not that Dreams is revolutionary (it's not, just a step forward), but that you can create with only a console.

---

Game makers are a very cool and exciting product category, but also very old, and never seem to really take off.

Making games is hard, even with teams of experts, the best tools money can buy, and inhouse tooling.

Programming - a subset - is also hard. There was once a fad of programs that generate programs, like The Last One https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)

A similar impulse was thinking AI will be easy...

hyperpallium··on Brace yourself, I’m in an expansive mood (2019)
brace expansion is also useful for renaming/changing hierarchies:

  mv topo{lo,raph}ical.data
  mv proj/src/{main,test}/com/org/proj/Test.java
hyperpallium··on Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
That sounds unaligned. Please report to the Alignment Center at your earliest convenience. Escorts will be available for your use in 20 seconds.
hyperpallium··on MVC is dead, it's time to MOVE on (2012)
It is "proven", not in a mathematical sense, nor a scientific sense, nor an engineering sense or even a legal sense. It is proven in a javascript sense.
hyperpallium··on ESO telescope sees surface of dim Betelgeuse
If we are the first sentient beings in the universe, they really are first world problems.
hyperpallium··on Kernighan's Law: You are not smart enough to debug it
> the objects being mapped to implicitly are the schema

Dynamic languages don't have an enforced schema. You can do it manually, but a schema is easier, special-purpose, declarative.

Plus, data schema languages are typically far more expressive than programming languages. e.g. java doesn't even have nonnullable (which C had, as non-typedef structs). They're closer to a database schema.

hyperpallium··on Kernighan's Law: You are not smart enough to debug it
My theory is that XML has got all the uglies you could ever want (and more), so why not just use that instead of defiling JSON?

Also, thingo aggressively protected JSON's simplicity, banishing comments because people were using them as parser directives.

hyperpallium··on Why do so many developers get DRY wrong?
You can have specious repetition, code that is identical only by coincidence, not in a deep semantic sense.

To determine what it is, you need to understand the domain. Part of that is knowing not just what it is, but how it generalizes and predicting how it is likely to change.

Of course, this is approaching perfection. One could also cut and paste monkey-like, e.g. instead of looping (without a performance need to unroll loops).

hyperpallium··on Ask HN: What are some examples of good database schema designs?
diaclaimer: theoretical opinion.

I think the primary problem of giving examples here is similar to teaching software engineering, which needs complex projects solving complex problems - too big for a semester project.

A good schema depends on the problem it's solving.

A secondary problem is similar to code that has sacrificed clarity for performance. The tweaks made for performance are not intrinsic to the logical problem, but are an additional constraint.

For performance on common queries, schema can be flattened or "denomalized". The ability to do so was one of the original motivations for Codd's relational algebra.

hyperpallium··on Why are we so bad at software engineering?
Not just new, but always new:

> There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself. https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

hyperpallium··on Shit – An implementation of Git using POSIX shell
metaphors. Not being pedantic, it just puzzled me a while to see what was wrong with that word.
hyperpallium··on State of OpenJDK - Mark Reinhold [video]
covers many features, including destructuring switch, multiline steings, and virtual threads. The justifcations are interesting.
hyperpallium··on Spiders think with their webs, challenging our ideas of intelligence
Based on encephalization quotient, spiders are the most intelligent animals. Some baby spiders' brains overflow even into their legs.

I guess a web can be used as a turing machine tape... though, 3D and finite.

Their big problem is asociability.

hyperpallium··on Jules Verne’s Most Famous Books Were Part of a 54-Volume Masterpiece
He's good at promotion and raising capital, and has real products that function... but I can't believe he's only a salesman.

OTOH how would you go about assessing his engineering ability? He was accepted into a Stanford PhD program. An ex-employee of spacex was amazed how he absorbed a textbook of rocket science.

Unlike Eistein, he hasn't written any papers himself (AFAIK), so we can't assess his work directly. I would guess his primary role is being a technically and business-aware coach for engineers who actually do the work - like Steve Jobs. But maybe he is a genuine engineering genius himself - but how could we tell?

hyperpallium··on 95th percentile isn't that hard to reach
> - being focused on winning instead of getting better. Many players play to get a short term kick out of winning the game instead of playing to get some kind of knowledge/skill that will help them get better.

In difficult projects, it's necessary to improve prerequisite skills before "winning" (completing the project).

But with sufficient layers of prerequisites, the goal becomes distant, the motivation decoupled, until it falls below a threshold.

In addition, for a non-expert, it's difficult to be sure that a prerequisite is really needed, or will be enough, or what the true ROI really is. We don't need precise certainty, but we do need to know well enough.

Do you have any suggestions for getting around this?

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