l_theanine

I’ve trained hundreds of people across many roles for thirty years.

I have two things I’d like to add:

- A mistake you are willing to learn from is not just a mistake. It’s a lesson. It can yield as much reward as you’d like, depending on the effort you spend to reflect and change things.

- Most advice like this, when it comes to things someone learned after moving up a rank in some org chart, is not as portable as we might like to think. Teams are always different shapes. In the end, if business functions are being executed well and if the people doing those things are paid well and happy to stick around, then you’ll find over time it really just doesn’t matter what the process looks like or the permutations of productivity-fu you put on it.

Anyhow, this is a nice article. I enjoy reading stories about career progression like this. I wish I had read more twenty years ago to learn this stuff, I made a lot of “mistakes” then.

Keep it up!

Luckily, I wasn’t replying to you? Weirdo.

Not the person you’re replying to, but a little common sense would imply warnings along the line of “if you don’t do this properly, a crew of innocent people fall out of the sky and fucking die whilst screaming all the way down”

I’m talking about code organization, not types. In Julia, methods are grouped together by type dispatch, mostly. There are times when code reuse comes into play where it’s helpful, but mostly it just confuses the issue and introduces ambiguity into the structure of the program in the big picture sense.

My mistake, I saw your name was xiaodai and assumed.

My point is, Julia is not suited for general software, and it’s questionable as a tool for technical computing as well.

For running simulations and models where the code can be written and never looked at again, maybe it’s okay to use. But for anything else, Python is a lot nicer, and a lot more practical to write proper software in.

Jesus. This is the most tasteful, flexed out but not over the top landing page I’ve ever seen.

I love it. I’ve no use for something like this, but I’m in absolute awe at the design on display. Marvelous. I hope Apple or somebody makes this person obscenely wealthy.

C++ is a beaut', compared to Perl. It's ugly too, don't get me wrong. I'll be the last one to hold up C++ or PHP as beautiful, but Rust is just too gross to look at, I have NO idea how people program in it.

I think the only thing Rust has really brought to the table is the idea that alternative memory schemes like ownership can be valuable. That idea will slowly disseminate into Python/Ruby, and other languages from there, and those of us who appreciate beauty will continue to program with proper tools.

I'm actually looking into Ocaml lately. The 5.0 release is really interesting, and the next release of OPAM will have proper Windows support and everything. Rust takes a lot from Ocaml, as I understand the original compiler was written in it, and inspired by it.

I think mutable shared state is bad, as you do, but I think so less because of the advantage that a tool like Rust or Erlang brings to the table in handling that state, and moreso because of the programming practices it brings about regardless of the language. Treating a session as stateful, or really treating any io-capable object as mutable is definitely a big mistake. That much is clear. I think as the years go on, more languages will embrace this wisdom and replace Rust's incredibly rigid and unfriendly experience with things like proper object capability systems, effect handling, and whatever instruments would be useful from formal verification methodology.

And again, all of that could conceivably land in Python/Ruby eventually, or as extensions, whatever.

I guess what I'm saying is that over a long enough timespan, it would seem that ideas are always going to win out and language designers will slowly advance towards that front, while retaining beautiful code.

It's interesting that you mention Clojure, because a lot of really cool ideas bouncing around the Ruby/Python sphere originated or at least came to widespread popularity in Clojure. I'd put Erlang up there as equally influential as well. Clojure also shares the feature of highly-writable and highly-readable code, which qualifies it for beautiful, imo. How often do you come across a Clojure function that's just cluttered with {}{}<T><T><<T>RefCell>(); bullshit, to the point where it's not immediately clear what is happening? Now, compare that with Clojure. If ever there's a complicated Clojure function, I'd wager that it either a) deals with Java interop, which, God bless you. or b) is just a highly abstracted function, and can be grokked by walking backwards up the calls one-by-one. Terseness can be daunting, but it's almost always a simple case of gathering context to understand those functions ending in )))))})).

Anyhow, I've wasted too many bytes here.

Since you've a decade in Ruby, have you tried Crystal at all? I heard about it last year sometime, but was turned off by no Windows support.

I haven't used asyncio that much, certainly not in any serious sense, but wouldn't ContextVar lookups be a major factor of performance in serious asyncio code? Using tasks for things that aren't io-bound seems likely to give a false sense of performance superiority when doing basically nothing.

I'd definitely be more apt to have this as part of production system instead of the Rust one.

Rust has got to be the ugliest, most unfriendly programming language I've ever laid my eyes on. And I wrote Perl for 10+ years, so that's really quite a feat of aesthetics failure.

Anyhow, I'm pretty impressed with the performance thus far, I like the idea of having multiple JITs available for a single-language ecosystem, regardless of how disgusting the language used to implement them. I think having competition means that there will be a race to the bottom and towards the "center" of general work. It's already really cool to see how the different approaches have clear preferences of the tasks they excel at and where they fall short.

This is hugely valuable because it pushes Ruby forward for everybody, and will hopefully result in not only a faster Ruby for X, but a faster Ruby for everything, which is just an objectively good thing.

Python is in a weird spot in this arena, because it is very clearly and very strongly orienting itself to continue to dominate practical data science work, and that means the need for JITs to handle regular jobs like text munging and whatnot fall by the side in order for the latest NumPy and Jax stuff, whatever is the current hot shit in the AIverse. Ruby doesn't suffer from that because it's pretty solidly lodged in the web development sphere, while also having a capable presence in netsec tools, application scripting, and probably a few more areas that I'm not aware of.

If you're interested in some of cutting edge Python stuff, I'd recommend taking a look at exaloop/Codon. Codon will soon be able to output Python extensions that are compatible with Python's setuptools, so it will soon be possible to just include some .codon files with your project, use setup.py, and have decorators that can (literally) 100x your hot loops.

Oh well I didn’t say I thought it was mutually exclusive. Germs aren’t the only part of working a shit job. Whether it’s in person, over a video call, or over email, if your supervisor is a dickhead then your team will be unhappy.

I was thinking primarily about people who work indoors, in rooms with poor circulation. I’d wager those people are sicker more often, unwell more often, and obese more often. That’s all I meant.

I hate the back talking and advertising. I already bought the device, I’m a prime member, why can’t you just tell me the temperature and shut the fuck back up?

I hate the stupid thing but my wife has a little more patience for her than me.

Siri on the other hand, never seems to miss.

Are there some large users or projects that are committed to the stdlib and not Base that I could look into or read about?

Thanks in advance.

So, you’d say there’s a healthy contingent of upstream devs dedicated to the health and diversity of the built in stdlib?

May I also ask, have you worked with Ocaml for any medium to large projects?

I’d be curious to hear from major users that are NOT using Base, and hear how they’re getting on. The 5.0 release especially has catalyzed my interest in Ocaml, and I’ve a few years left in me still before retirement, I’d like to pick up one last niche ‘fore I quit.

Ocaml seems somewhat hampered by this weird disconnect between upstream maintainers and Jane Street and other third party major users. Popular media for ocaml learners describes using Base, while documentation focuses on the builtins, which clearly aren’t used that often in practice.

Do I have this wrong? Why doesn’t Ocaml just merge Base (with permission) and put their best foot forward for the ecosystem?

In this thread: a bunch of fabricated stories about how AirBNB is “actually a good thing”

Absolutely absurd to me how much internet traffic is being obliterated by pornography. So sad to think of the magnitude of time wasted, lives ruined, talent shuttered, ingenuity squandered, etc.

Wonderful list though, wouldn’t have thought such a simple list would tell so much about internet users. I half expected HN to be there, but perhaps we’re all not pressing Refresh quite often enough. I was also very surprised to know that pornhub is higher than Amazon. Even depraved perverts buy things online, surely?

I'm not making an argument about Microsoft, but rather about the low regard I have for people who make inflammatory comments about companies online when there's human beings there doing all the work, affected by the negativity. It's just childish, and reeks of chronically online personalities.

Making a personal remark about me is plenty of reason for me to mention my success, since they implied that my perspective is somehow fueled entirely by some stock that I own. I have actual experience working alongside some MS people, and I have held that stock since 2013. So what? My opinion just goes out the window? That doesn't make much sense to me, I don't know about you...

The reason I associate that with youth is that young people often don't have a healthy portfolio or indeed any financial hygiene to speak of and seem to think that business is a zero sum game. We all benefit from the business world pushing things forward if we're holding stock in the most powerful companies. I'm hardly a supporter of the capitalist system, but I'll be damned if it's not going to work in my favor, since I understand how things are. My responsibility is to my family first. Had there been a revolution when I was younger, I'd have been among the first in line to change things, but it didn't happen.

I think I'm wasting my time in this thread, though.

I’ve been reading about microbiomes and things like that over the past year, and I suspect there’s a biological aspect to a lot of mental health issues in workplaces. Certainly the pandemic has renewed public interest in it, but I think to put it in caveman terms: sick people leave sick germs where they go.

I haven’t read this paper yet, but it looks pretty cool so far. The abstract certainly makes it seem worth the read.

We seem to think ourselves as further removed from meatspace than we really are. We’re a lot more like colonies of ants, I think. What attacks the ant, attacks the colony.

Bummer, I guess. I got rich and paid for three kids to go to Ivy League schools, bought a house a mile and a half from the White House, and before too long will leave them a seven figure nest egg after my wife and I are dead.

But hey, revel in your internet wit, mighty commenter! Your immense mental stature frightens me! ;-)

My salary doesn’t depend on it, it’s just in my portfolio. I’m just not an idiot…

I do consulting and bill upwards of 300/hr worked in the DC area, with several decades of experience and a network built up along the way.

I took this position thirty years ago too, my mind hasn’t changed except that young people feel like they’re clever or somehow intellectually valid for copy pasting a quote into a web forum.

I’d love something like this just for python. Especially sans HN style moderation.

I've worked on contracts alongside MS employees and researchers in the past, and I've been pleasantly surprised.

Three decades of experience in the field, and unfortunately, I don't have quite the brooding disdain for Microsoft. Their stock has lined my pockets, their employees have treated my respectfully when we've worked together, their products do what they're advertised to do.

Something tells me you're under 40.

I think it's deliberately obtuse to claim to represent such an opinion. The people on "git blame" for this will end up being reprimanded in some way, in serious cases.

If we're chalking it up to "Microsoft sucks" then that's fine, but it'd be better imo to just say THAT, rather than sneak up to the point via this auxiliary issue of this user agent string. Someone has to answer for these individual fuck-ups, it's intentionally shitty behavior to be insinuating that someone did this maliciously under the guise of end users assuming innocence, thereby obscuring the responsibility for it.

Imagine being someone who made a simple mistake, and people on some weird internet forum with no identity verification said "Oh, that guy must be malicious!" and you lose your job. How would you feel? It's justified, if I understand the point you're trying to make, right?

Which is worse?

Edit: Not that I expect much from here, but since there are a number of child(ish) replies, I might as well clarify this for the replies that I'm not going to individually address:

I'm not saying it's not cool to say "Microsoft sucks" or anything like that. If that's how you feel, then feel free to just say that. It's the internet. What's NOT cool is making up an imaginary situation where someone's simple error is part of this conspiracy that Microsoft is this terrible evil corporation, when there's thousands of decent, community-loving people that work there, one of whom made this error, more than likely by simple carelessness. It's not that big of a deal, it's not a showstopper by any means, and will be a simple fix in due time, almost undoubtedly.

There are people behind software, but a lot of commenters seem to think it's professionally appropriate to just shit on things because they're from Microsoft or because they're from Apple, or wherever. Just say you don't like Microsoft, or that you don't like Apple. It's so antisocial to take the stance I keep seeing.

I think the young people call this "parasocial" these days. Back in my day, we called it "fanatics", where there's this unhealthy obsession and seemingly anthromorphized view of corporations and institutions where hundreds or thousands of different, varied, diverse groups of people are all cohesively accomplishing or building things. It dismisses nuance, it rejects common sense understanding of how teams of people work, and is reductive and hostile to actually intelligent conversations about products and ideas.

I think sometimes it’s a misunderstanding of the platform by people with no clue what they’re doing, and maybe a partial language barrier?

More common than you think on educational repos like this.

Pretty good curriculum, I’m not sold on MongoDB, I’d prefer someone with Postgres or SQLite experience so they can be immediately useful on a project, but it’s better than nothing, which would be even worse.

There’s a rather deep rabbit hole really about figuring out what the best beginner curriculum should look like, because if the diversity of the applicability of Python. They might be doing to a data science role, a sysadmin role, an infosec role, an educational role, you just never know. I think it’d be prohibitively difficult to unify these tracks, and might even play a role in the perceived difficulty for a lot of people coming to computer work from zero programming experience.

Someday, I’d like to see some sort of AI platform that can gauge a users intuition about the concepts on the whiteboard and tailor lessons to be impressed upon that user the best way. I’d teach a 30yo with ten years of Excel munging experience different than I’d teach a 20yo with no CS education at all besides video games. That could be automated to great benefit, imo.

Those people are people less likely to be reading HN, no?

I have heard some people talk about leaving for woodworking and stuff like that, but most people in my circle who get burnt out just stop doing government contracts and get regular jobs when it gets bad. Or go on vacation, have kids, etc.

The immediate implication would be to expect lesser price raises from other providers.

Akamai recently acquired Linode, and it was definitely perceived as a foreboding piece of news... and now here they go raising the prices.

I guess you think I didn't already read the article?

I'm questioning the legitimacy of the claims. I'm plenty literate, so no copy-paste recap needed, thanks.

I find it unlikely that somebody randomly shanks someone a dozen times just because of stress, in a workplace environment.

Surely these two gentleman either knew each other and something had happened, OR the attacker knew the victim and there was some sort of issue, romantic or something like that to where he would've been angry enough to try and kill this other man.

Of course Microsoft is going to say "Oh, they didn't work with each other or know each other as far as we know, this is just a crazy thing that happened" because they want to be left out of this as much as possible. Which is probably fine. I doubt the MS Teams experience is bad enough to kill over, bad as it may be.