josalhor

I find it important because it lowers the barrier of entry to print debugging. I have found myself using less prints in Java than in Python both because of static typing and having to write the full `System.out.println`.

This is also important to me because I am very cautious of not doing a file-level import (I don't want to commit a file with the dependency). The fewer characters it takes, the easier it is for me to write it all in a single line and remove it afterward.

This is actually really cool. I was going to say that so many people miss the point of print debugging and as a consequence forget to shorten the import line as much as possible.

  from icecream import ic;ic() is 28 characters

  import q;q() is 12 characters

  print() is 7 characters

The same thing happens all over Software really. Just because a tool is powerful is looked up as superior, or better.

The main argument that I have seen is that in print debugging you are relying on the program being executed in a non-descriptive/non-declarative fashion.

I legitimately believe print debugging is incredibly powerful (With a simple print I can check if a function is being called, how many times, if the value has the value I expected and the only requirement I need is to be able to see the stdout of the process. I say that is fantastic!

The real world is all about cost analysis. How much value can I get from a tool vs setup and running cost. The cost of print debugging is incredibly small.

I had never heard that phrase. Very insightful.

My professor thinks otherwise

As for my personal opinion, I haven't reflected on it too much, but I think capacity implies a quantitative (edit: measurable may be a better word?) output, but not necessarily fungible.

To be fair to my professor, the question does make sense in the context of the subject. That is, the subject focuses on answering questions like: How much I am producing? How much could I produce? How do I measure that? Etc. The subject intentionally ignores business models.

So, the question "How do you measure the capacity of a legal team?" (note it says capacity), makes sense. It's the answer I disagree with.

I am fine where I am. I will graduate next year in Computer Science and Bussiness Management with good grades. I thought about quitting and enrolling in Computer Science and Mathematics when I started. But I think I can make a bigger impact in the world by staying in my current program.

> Really curious what school is this?

My local university. If you want the specific school, my handle is associated with my real-world identity. It won't be hard to figure out.

> Pricing the value of in-house counsel is an interesting problem in itself (because they typically don't bill by the hour).

Absolutely!

> One could use an insurance policy pricing model (the worst that could happen is a very costly loss in a lawsuit) to determine what's the counsel protecting the company from.

Also true. The lack of cost analysis in my classes worries me very much.

> No, I think he is right. Assuming the aim is to optimise for profitability, the machines output items are chargeable but it is a lawyers hours that are chargeable

I have updated the post to expand on your observation.

Just the other day I was in my logistics class and the professor started deviating into something that I believe was pure nonsense.

He started the lecture by analyzing how many pieces a machine could manufacture per day. Fair enough. He extended the model to measure different ratios of capacity. Makes sense.

Then he tried to extend the model to all machines, including humans. His example was: "How do you measure the capacity of a legal team?". I thought it was a trick question, so I answered (paraphrasing) "You can't answer that question the same way you answer for the machine. You can't give a single metric." He told me I was wrong and that the _right_ measure would be (total number of working hours/day).

I was tempted to try to convince him otherwise. The analogy was deeply flawed. He certainly measured the machines in (number of pieces / day) but measured the legal team in (hours/day). So, in analyzing a machine, you take into account its efficiency, but you don't do the same thing for humans.

I believe that is exactly the same thing that is going on in the post. Managers/Logistics/Economists are very susceptible to this kind of generalization pitfalls.

Edit: Given that this answer has generated some discussion I feel the need to expand on it. The legal team was not expected to sell their services "by the hour". In fact, any discussion about how their services were sold was shut down by the professor. From his point of view, the lawyers were machines and he was asking the question "how much can this machine produce?"

Yes, other students also suggested taking the number of billable hours/revenue into account, but that's not the answer the professor was looking for.

I don't criticize whether his answer is not technically right, but I feel it holds no real-world meaning. It was a purely academic question that leads nowhere instead of having a debate about how you measure the productivity of a group of human beings. And on top of that, his final answer was definitive and (from his point of view) was irrefutable.

While I somewhat agree with the sentiment of your comment, one of the reasons I believe Hacker News is so civilized is because the arguments are always very rationalized. That is, it is easy to point out faulting logic.

Following up with your example: If someone simply states [y] then the context of where [y] came from is lost and the discussion turns into a person saying [x] and a person saying [y], which is a step too close to becoming Twitter.

While I agree it can sometimes be a bit tiresome to read and write, I say this significantly improves the overall quality of the conversations.

To be fair, certain compilation flags can change the time complexity of some algorithms if the mistake is trivial enough to figure out.

Fixing bugs that reduce engagement is profitable. I am pretty confident this kind of bug has easily costed Rockstar in the order of 10-100 million dollars _per year_.

I have a friend who works at Rockstar. I have forwarded the blog post to him.

To be fair, at the time I wrote my comment the Reddit post had 400+ votes and the HN one was in the early double digits IIRC.

Looks to me more like Reddit hug of death: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/lpusc7/nextcloud_is_n...

> Can you elaborate on what you mean by Societal Costs of crypto?

Here are some of the associated costs of crypto:

- Environmental effects for the energy consumption that is not clean and the corresponding breakeven for clean energy.

- Subsidized costs of energy are a direct cost into governments budget.

- By increasing electricity consumption miners are increasing the demand and therefore the cost. This drives up inequality.

I haven't found a better term than "Societal Costs" that summarizes all these costs.

> This, and the potential of smart contracts that use the "Crypto Dollar" are where I see the most potential.

Absolutely!

But diamonds do have some pretty awesome mechanical properties [0]. They do have intrinsic value. Sure, the intrinsic value of diamonds < value of diamonds, but at least when you mine diamonds a percentage of it will go into use.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_properties_of_diamond

Are you saying there are people out there that are happier investing in "crypto" than in "stock X" or "gold" or "bonds"? It just makes them happier that that particular name appears on the screen?

I don't doubt that is the case, but that kind of reinforces my point. The societal cost of crypto is too high. If we have to justify the electrical consumption of crypto because people enjoy it more when they see its name on their screen, we are clearly doing something wrong.

> That's pretty much true for anything that has financial value, though.

Correct. Maybe a better statement would be "I don't see that the inherent value of crypto is bigger than that of the dollar or gold". This gets even more complicated when you take into account the cost of the transactions that I have discussed with another user.

> Although you may disagree with the current value of most cryptocurrencies

I would like to clarify something. I didn't say I disagreed with the value of cryptocurrencies (that is, its value in dollars). I said I find their societal cost way too high. In other terms, (Inherent Value of crypto < Societal Costs of crypto).

> would you at least agree that their inhenrant value isn't 0?

I agree with that. Although my previous answer stated "I don't see tangible value in crypto" I suppressed the paragraph that said that crypto may have some inherent value when it comes down to international transactions (or transactions in general). If international transactions in crypto are cheaper than with banks, clearly those who want to make these transactions do see some inherent value in the currency. That is, its value would emerge from its transaction properties.

I did suppress the paragraph because I just don't know enough about the fees of such transactions. I think it is reasonable to expect Banks and Financial entities to offer transaction fees lower than Crypto for all use cases. If that happened, then I just don't see any value in crypto whatsoever.

I have said it a few times on HN: I see more potential into a "Crypto Dollar" than in crypto in general.

> Does anybody else think that the "mining is bad for the environment and gamers can't buy the cards" argument is a bit weird? After all, if all these cards weren't used for mining but for gaming, wouldn't the environmental outcome be the same?

I never had that specific opinion, but I have another point of view.

Games bring inherent value to the table. That is, if you didn't play games you would be reading a book, going outside to play, browsing the web... Games fill a purpose and bring value. Whether or not I believe our current consumption of videogames is acceptable is irrelevant.

I don't see tangible value in crypto. Crypto is worth what other people are willing to pay for it. If you wanted to invest in an asset that does not depend on the currency you could buy gold.

(I had a paragraph here making a point about international transaction costs. I removed it because I started to find it offtopic. Long story short: I find the societal cost of crypto way too high).

I currently have a project with Django and you made me look this up because I remembered it differently. And yes, there is in fact a cache layer between the QuerySet (.all) and the iteration.

See: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/topics/db/queries/#cac...

> I don't think most normal people see "without banks" as a feature.

The other day I walked into a shop where I couldn't pay by card because the banks didn't provide the service to them. Users don't see "without banks" as a feature, but businesses will. It will reduce their fees and their dependency to the whole industry.

I see a huge potential in cryptocurrencies, just not in Bitcoin per se. I can totally see the European Central Bank controlling some kind of CryptoEuro that is tied to the real euro and allows individuals to make transactions without banks.

Banks would become an optional frontend on this transaction system, with security features built-in, etc.

If you freed all those resources, you could equivalently reduce fossil fuel consumption (up to 0%, of course). So I say it matters very much.

My experience with mypy has been pretty negative.

Not because mypy is bad per se, but it just doesn't flow into a Python workflow naturally. Every time you try to interact with an external module without these annotations you immediately lose all the advantages of statically typed programs.

For me, Python with annotations just doesn't make sense, at that point I would prefer to program in Rust or Java.

Alternative question: I am looking for the fastest online unknown size integer parser possible in C/C++.

The best I have heard is Boost::Spirit [0].

[0]: https://kholdstare.github.io/technical/2020/05/26/faster-int...

I don't think he is arguing against fungibility. In fact, he compared stocks and cash under the assumption of fungibility.

I think he is arguing against the idea of applying fractional reserves to brokers.

I think you meant to reply to another comment.