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adenozine

Should we trust bricklayers to design bridges? Should we trust welders to fly the planes too?

This is such a brain dead take on things. Have some humility with your cheap box dye, ugh.

Sorry, are you implying that filmmaking is somehow less universal than software engineering?

Many jobs are more difficult than hacking on Angular bs all day, it’s not like most devs implicitly deserve the high pay they enjoy here in the States.

Not to mention, most people are far more likely to pay for a movie than for a piece of software, excluding video games.

You might like to read about the Writers Guild in Hollywood. Highly organized, high salaries far surpassing even that of tech, with graduates in the top percentiles coming into 500k/yr salaries fresh out of graduation, all union.
Re:The Janet Language on Tuesday February 21, 2023 @09:27PM (#34890792)
So what about streams? Functions? Closures? Call/cc structures?

I understand your point if you are speaking in literal terms about just simple cons cells, but in practical Lisp/Scheme code, you don’t really rely on just the basics to do things.

I think there’s a hyperfocus sometimes on the simplicity of the core of lisp, the apply/eval balance, but it’s quite possible and often easy and convenient to perform normal programming tasks with these languages as well.

Re:Simulating Softbody Dynamics in Vlang on Monday February 20, 2023 @05:20PM (#34873735)
I am learning it now, it’s pretty neat. I think the simplicity is a big appeal for me. I’ve tried Nim but it just seemed inconsistent, the case insensitivity is insane, and I think there’s a lot of minor but still odd syntax decisions that have been made. I’d rather just use python, which is nice, than have to finagle my Nim code just for a little speed boost.

Sum types and TCO with -prod is a really nice feature as well. Not supporting TCO was a huge bummer when I tried Nim, and many other languages tbh.

I already use Go sometimes, so picking up vlang was basically free, and I haven’t had time to do any big substantial projects with it, but I wrote a little irc bot with it and had a good afternoon hacking on it.

Re:The Janet Language on Saturday February 18, 2023 @07:35AM (#34846441)
Any examples to add, or you just want to leave it at pithy comment?
Re:TIL There's Another YAML on Friday February 17, 2023 @02:25AM (#34831853)
Filing this under “Raised My Blood Pressure…”
Hard agree! Time to strip some of the administrators and get some talent in the classrooms.

I heard Florida was letting people in classrooms after just a few hours of supervision.

If the education crisis isn’t addressed, this country will be absolutely decimated in another thirty years. A level of brain drain hitherto unwitnessed in modern times.

If I was raising a young child now (mine are in their late twenties) I’d be strongly weighing the pros and cons of suggesting they go abroad for higher education, and I’d certainly be hiring a tutor rather than trusting the K12 system. Not everybody can afford all of that, despite the money being taxed already. We could lower the military budget by a percentage point and fix all this tomorrow, if we really wanted to…

Re:Godot 4.0 RC 2 on Wednesday February 15, 2023 @11:48AM (#34806577)
Ever looked at OpenFL?

https://www.openfl.org/

Couple notable games haves used it. Haxe is a pretty mature ecosystem as well, from what I’ve heard.

I spent my thirties working and unwinding with flash games with my kids, brings back nostalgia thinking about those nights.

Re:Linode rebranded as Akamai’s cloud computing services on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @10:00PM (#34799488)
I’ve run some medium/large scale side projects with Linode in the past and like many others, I was absolutely blown away by the high quality and professional support I received.

If they can keep that aspect of it together, I’m sure they’ll be fine. I think the name change is a bad choice, but time will tell.

I'd rather gouge my eyes out than work with Rust code. Horrific.
Does Java still have a use for variables without final?

Does Javascript still have a use for functions without async/await?

This is just a repackaging of an age-old argument, imo.

When they invented the screw, it did not preclude the nail. /shrug

So, like Erlang?

What’s an example of a language that does this by default?

Re:Don’t force child care workers to get college degrees on Sunday February 12, 2023 @12:15AM (#34760061)
Alternatively, cap the price of tuition for childcare degrees?

People get degrees for leverage in wage negotiation, and to further their career. Advising against is anti-worker, imo.

The real crime is unattainable education.

I’m pleasantly surprised with how much progress the language is made.

I remember a mentally ill hit piece about it from a few years ago, and I think it was somewhat widely read.

Since then, Alex and the contributors have made huge strides in the language, and I think maybe sometime this year it might be time to start considering it for some hobby projects. Im hopeful for its future, it’s one of the recent languages that have a practical impetus imo: Go, but with all the shit you actually need.

Re:Ask HN: Are Paul Graham's Classic Startup Essays Outdated? on Saturday February 11, 2023 @09:53AM (#34752781)
Taking YC advice is sort of like getting cooking tips from customers coming out of a nice restaurant.

They’ve eaten good food, but they may or may not know anything about starting a business.

Paul Graham hasn’t started a company in several decades now. Just because he has proximity with a lot of people who have, doesn’t mean his advice is still sound.

He was competing with Perl shops, for crying out loud!

The scene has changed. A lot. Seek out lessons from success by yourself, directly. Ask local, search local, find the people successful near you in your industry and just ask them. Many will tell their tale over lunch, and then you’ve received personal, actionable advice for the price of a good meal.

I’ve heard this sentiment a lot from people who’ve read it.

I think he wrote himself into a tight spot though, and I’m happy with the result. Part of me thinks the second act could’ve been broken down into maybe like 0-1000, 1000-5000, and then the final act could’ve been essentially as it was, stripped down a bit. It felt to me like he crammed a little too much worldbuilding into it and couldn’t draw on the resourcefulness and resilience of humanity that dominates the first act. But it makes sense in context, because they’re not in such dire straits in the second half, and are approaching the whole issue from complex standpoints of religion and meaning and societal archetypes.

I surely couldn’t have done better, I know that much.

I liked Project Hail Mary (and Artemis, and The Martian) but I thought it was a little too heavy in the programmer narrative style. I won’t spoil anything in case someone reads this comment who hasn’t read it, but a large section involving establishing a communication protocol really wore me down from the story.

The big revelation about how he got there also felt nearly translucent in how obvious it was when it was revealed.

I hope he writes a couple more books though, if I can ever get some grandkids outta my kids, Weir’s books will be in their collection for sure.

If you like it, you might enjoy a book called Seveneves. The first sentence involves the moon blowing up, and the rest of the book is about the consequences of that. Quite good, imo.
What is Sam Altman’s credibility again, besides wealth?

Are we to assume he actually knows anything other than neuro-grift?

I’m not buying it.

Re:Music Programming for Java and JVM Languages on Monday February 06, 2023 @09:00AM (#34677348)
I’m the biggest python fan in the world, and you’re out of your mind if you think it can compete with Java for enterprise programming or even embedded programming for that matter. Not to mention the JVM underlying it, likely the second or third most sophisticated software project in the world.

In ten years, maybe Go. Long, LONG way to go in adoptability to push against Java shops.

Re:Ask HN: Employers, why do you want us back in the office? on Sunday February 05, 2023 @02:49PM (#34668424)
In this thread: lies, fabrications, misinformation, disinformation, deception, skullduggery, wayward words, dirty deeds, and a case and a half of the finest bullshit you’ll ever read.

They want you back in the office to make the management happy, to make the corporate rent make sense, to make the banks happy, to feed the giant machine whose primary purpose is 100% unequivocally NOT getting stuff done (tm)

If your team isn’t getting stuff done remote, investigate a protocol for communicating the business and product needs to the developers, and maybe skim some commits.

If you are being threatened with back to office and you don’t want to go, make them fire you, use your resources, and I’d estimate there’s about a 95% chance most of you can find a higher paying position elsewhere, or at least equal pay & remote-first. The world is changing, don’t let them play tricks on you.

I’ve fought with DC traffic for twenty years, I’ll be damned if I’m ever going to show up in an office for less than a client-vendor situation or L5/6+ all hands. If it’s on fire, you better call my work phone and make sure my deposits are up-to-date.

I know it’s tougher for the younger bucks out here, and that loans and rent and everything might tip the scales a little further away from you. Do your best, do what you can, but I strongly recommend putting up the fight for more comfortable work arrangements.

If we’re all gonna be obsolete in ten years, they might as well be paying us right and speaking to us right for the next nine!

Re:Sussman Explains the End of SICP on Sunday February 05, 2023 @04:49AM (#34663435)
It’s not quite arbitrarily. That’s an uncharitable definition. Python a) handles function arguments in a way that would make recursive functions awkward to use and b) cares about stacktraces being meaningful, so TCO would be a worse tradeoff towards that end as well.

There’s trampolines in almost any programming language to implement recursion if necessary, and python has itertools to build what Scheme calls streams, for arbitrary computation.

I don’t disagree with you, but I know plenty of folks with Masters making less than that, albeit outside of tech.

I’m not sure you deserve the downvotes, I think the way you phrased it might make people think you’re out of touch.

Re:Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now on Friday February 03, 2023 @03:15PM (#34647108)
It’s literally a product name drop and elevator pitch of user features.

I mean, I can appreciate your trying to take a nuanced approach, but it is quite literally and quite clearly an advertisement.

Re:Want anonymity? Make a persona not a mystery on Friday February 03, 2023 @01:13PM (#34645383)
I love Derek's writing. He's so casually eloquent, without being up his own ass like PG. I've learned a lot from reading what he's produced, and I can certainly attribute (in part) a few successful endeavors to being a "slow thinker" as he calls it.

We live in such an insane, reactionary world these days and I find it very refreshing to hear from people who've clearly thought hard about what they're about to say/write.

Sometimes, I even wish HN worked this way. I wish the front page was about 10x as slow, and that we could discuss things for a week or two instead of a day or two. It'd be messier, but I think the fruits, separated from the weeds, would be juicier.

Re:Tell HN: Firefox Is an awesome browser right now on Friday February 03, 2023 @08:17AM (#34640640)
This is very obviously an ad… at the top of the front page…

Y’all crack me up sometimes.

Re:Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot on Thursday February 02, 2023 @05:34PM (#34634209)
Well in perl there’s a concept of sigils.

my @num = (1, 2, 3);

my $num = 25;

say $num[1];

So that last line prints 2, which is obvious by looking at it, but can be difficult in more complex code when you’re overloading names by the way the variable is accessed.

Everything in perl is a rabbit hole of details, as an aside.

Anyhow, I just appreciate that the symbols always mean the same thing. Takes a load off of my brain. Like a single character type annotation, kinda.

Re:Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot on Thursday February 02, 2023 @03:05PM (#34632263)
Have I got a link for you!

https://github.com/llaisdy/beam_languages

See you down the rabbit hole!

Re:Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot on Thursday February 02, 2023 @12:02PM (#34629510)
I’m not sure the word for it, but brackets only ever mean two things, to my knowledge. Hash or Block, in Ruby.

I spent many years in perl, so I’m of the opinion visual indicators for datatypes are actually a good thing at the point of instantiation/composition.

Not sure how to properly word it

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