shallowthought

God my life would be so much easier if I could just choose which half of America the jury pool came from.

I have to wonder: Have we gone too far? Is TypeScript becoming more tedious than helpful? Has React lost its way in its blind zeal for pure functions?

...no, no, definitely not. Must've gone crazy for a second there.

Of course, it absolutely HAS to be a nation-state. There's just no way anybody not being paid millions of dollars could possibly break their ironclad blah blah whatever you get it

That's irrelevant to what Linus is saying. He's not saying "this is good code, but only with the caveat that it's written in C and run in the Linux Kernel". He's saying that changing it to make it far more difficult to read and modify, but cleverer, has made it better code in general.

DVORAK users might have something to say about that, you insensitive clod!

Is spelling "zero" as "xero" a pun I don't get?

My concern is that people might get too complacent with libraries that claim to make CSS local, and people might get lazy and all start using the exact same "generate a unique id" library, which will then start generating a ton of the same id across multiple users of that library.

Because it's more than six months old, and therefore totally obsolete.

An ineffable truth of webdev is that it is constantly disrupted by morons who claim to have an improvement, but really just want as many people as possible to use something THEY built.

That's a pretty big freakin thing to leave out, though. Code that depends on its context is, some would say, bad.

Good to know Paul Graham is still writing poorly thought-out articles. That guy's Lisp code must be a nightmare.

Here's my general thought, in a year we will all be singing the praises of something else, and my fellow webdevs will continue to mistake "different" for "better".

In other words, instead of doing it the standard, commonly-accepted way, the author did it his own way, and it ended up being worse.

No, seriously, why would anyone even care that they're "inspired"? Icons are not supposed to communicate aesthetic wonder or make you think about life, they're supposed to indicate something very, very clearly.

Part of it is probably that people get defensive concerning anything on which they've spent a large amount of time and effort.

I don't get how articles like these get reposted so often - this article is from 2019, for god's sake. If you're interested in the state of the city budget, Covid-19 combined with the passage of a year means that you really need to double-check everything in this article, so at best, it's a waste of time. At worst, you're being pushed toward a very biased, incomplete view of things - I'm not saying every article published by a "think tank" is factually wrong, but ignoring such articles is a handy lifehack.

I was very, very obsessed with Haskell for about 9 months, during which time I attempted to make a very simple web app at least 5 times. I like debugging, but I just flat-out couldn't make it work. Plus, constantly feeling stupid is a huge drain on one's motivation to continue. Plus, the community was... not helpful. I mean, I get the whole "Avoid success at all costs", to avoid the language becoming entangled with the desires of large corporate interests, but it did feel a little extreme. Mind, this was 7 years ago, and I assume haskell stack and a few other tools make things a lot easier.

Actually, this is something I've always wondered: I know that any Haskell enthusiast would, upon hearing someone say, "I like the ideas, but it's just too hard to program in", respond, no, it's not, you just didn't learn it the right way, or this IDE with that extension makes it much easier, or you really should have started with Learn You A Haskell. But what I'm really curious about is this: Putting all that said, assume for the moment that Haskell really is too complicated for anyone without an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology to understand.

Do you care?

Man, whatever you're working on must be incredibly interesting and difficult to necessitate a language with the advanced tools necessary to translate even the most abstract of thoughts into code.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to write a web app that accepts this API and returns these things... and implement auth... sigh.

They just have to establish a history of suing people for using that word because part of keeping your copyright is showing that you have fought for it in court.

I call it Promo-Driven Development. You have to launch things to get promoted at Google, but you're not going to get demoted for transferring to a better project afterward.

> My main argument -- which I think is being lost here -- is that Ocaml isn't IDE unfriendly, and especially not so unfriendly that an entirely new language is needed just so that FP and IDEs can happily coexist.

Right, and I guess my counterargument would be that, yes it is, and you don't need to resort to logic to see it - just do a little googling about its poor adoption.

Don't worry - it's fine.

Which is a process that happens all the time... in movies. In reality, it's chaos.

This is the most irritating paywall I've ever seen. Why did you submit this?

Or have never been in a situation where their mother, father, or themself has a serious medical condition requiring over $1,000,000 and many years of fighting to treat it. "I can't be bought" is a failure of imagination.

I think it's impossible to have a fair trial when the guy has made an entire career out of detailing precisely what illegal actions he has taken.

Because they were bypassing the approval process, which exists for a good reason, otherwise they wouldn't expend so many resources on it, sorry for being reasonable and obvious, we can all go back to scouring the shadows now.

I love how this asshole is clearly just trying to modify policy in reaction to what he thinks people wants, rather than doing the right thing from day one, because he obviously has no idea whatsoever how to do the right thing.

Has Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg in particular, ever really made a secret of being a ruthless anti-competitive asshole? I always thought that was his one redeeming trait - the fact that he was honest about it. True, he occasionally claimed in interviews to be about "bringing people together", but I always felt he went out of his way to make sure everyone listening knew he didn't mean it.

Or maybe they hired a bunch of engineers to move fast and break things, promoted them, and now those same people are leading their engineering efforts and trying really, really hard to do something they suck at, which is writing maintainable code.