jaccarmac
jaccarmac on Hacker News
I commented elsewhere: Satantango is easily my least favorite LK so far. If you want to try something else, I would recommend The Melancholy of Resistance as a novel with similar concerns but better execution, War & War as a metafictional odyssey, or the short stories.
I've loved all of the work I've read except Satantango, so if you bounce of that novel I would recommend the rest. That said, I started with the short story collection The World Goes On and thought it was brilliant.
I'm biased because I lived down the street from a bookstore connected to a translation publishing house, but I can't recommend translated fiction enough for opening one's eyes to the weird relationship between a person, their language, and the works they read.
A discussion by Joe is helpful here; It contains some code:
https://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2003-March/007..."Crashing is loud" below is a phrase to combine with "remote error recovery" from the link above. Erlang/OTP wants application structure that is peculiar to it, and makes that structure feel ergonomic.
> If I ship a feature that has a type error on some code path ... How is "let it crash" helpful to my customer?
The crash can be confined to the feature instead of taking down the entire app or corrupting its state. With a well-designed supervision structure, you can also provide feedback that makes the error report easier to solve.
However, while a type error in some feature path is a place that makes type annotations make sense, type annotations can only capture a limited set of invariants. Stronger type systems encode more complex invariants, but have a cost. "Let it crash" means bringing a supervisor with simple behavior (usually restart) or human into the loop when you leave the happy path.
Over the past several years I have slowly patched the .NET version of Shen to run on Linux and modern .NET releases. I also learned about Higher-Order Perl the other year and have a dream of going through the book and implementing the exercises in Shen while tuning the compiler.
But while I have had a broad interest in compilers for years and years, it feels difficult-to-impossible to actually complete any of it. Part of it's general depression and time management, part is looking at the long story of these projects and the lack of progression: Stuck in a rut of mediocrity.
https://github.com/rkoeninger/ShenSharp
https://github.com/jaccarmac/junkcode/tree/79ea647d4ddbe41cf...
Externs are the main user-facing hurdle, and there's plenty of JS that doesn't bother declaring its shape ahead of time or uses dynamic access patterns.
> debugger hot reload
Hey, that's (close to) the traditional Smalltalk introduction-trick! And this has been available since 1.1? How does one concretely do that in Java and why is it not widely known?
After browsing these comments, I would like to encourage fellow Dallasites to read László Krasznahorkai's short story "Nine Dragon Crossing", available in the collection The World Goes On. It's the most accurate thing I've read about being human amidst our freeways.
You're right that it's not entirely different.
But I'll start with the simple version of the critique. Individual commuters make their decision about whether to make a trip based in part on the time that trip will take (a function of road congestion). Thus, adding road capacity will temporarily lower the cost of a trip, allowing more people to make it until congestion reaches the pre-expansion level. Housing does not have this problem because consumers make decisions about where to live much more infrequently.
As you can tell, "induced demand" is a bad if rather catchy name. To be fair to urban planners, the throughput of an expanded road does increase. However, the experience of using it stays the same or gets worse, and the cost (both $ and space) is disproportionate. Is the pro-transit argument, which I subscribe to.
Of course, the real world includes large real estate firms which are making frequent decisions on housing stock. So I agree that the build-more-housing-and-everything-will-improve crowd is wrong. But I don't think YIMBY/transit and anti-transit are the only choices. The former is a common archetype these days.
Smalltalk can use a similar bootstrapping method, which blew my mind the first time I read and understood (see
https://ftp.squeak.org/docs/OOPSLA.Squeak.html, "Smalltalk to C Translation"). In that world, images can easily obscure some of the lineage. Scheme has the advantage of having a standard to hold dialects to. I am watching this project with interest.
Kinda. Shooting from the hip based on fuzzy gatherings from IPFS usage here, but as I understand it: The leaf-level data blocks will be shared between the Merkle trees, but at least the tip (the object a given hash actually refers to) and maybe some of the other structural information will be different.
Could you elaborate? Feels like a fun riff, even if it's just about string-sorting algorithms.
The last couple years of evidence suggests that keeping the grid up requires a certain amount of central planning. On one hand, the frequency must remain relatively stable, globally. On the other, consumers don't want to deal with every fluctuation of the price (as they found out when they were exposed to the spike prices during spring '21). On principle, Texas is going to make sure that the energy sector is taken care of financially, so we end up in the situation we're in: Advertise the grid as market-purely as you can, engage in just enough planning to keep it up and the money flowing.
I'm not familiar with X internals and am not sure if it's the same thing, but EXWM basically allows that (browsers run in buffers).
People already install police cameras in their home. They have a corporate logo on them and are sold as a product with certain benefits. Of course, since we live in a world of nation states, there's some point at which Amazon interacts with them...
It's interesting that The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata is not mentioned in Apostol's byline here. As a short piece, this essay focuses on the surface of the history and its immediate implications, but the novel investigates many of the themes more deeply. It's particularly obsessed with the relationship between colonization and translation in the Phillipines, is consistently funny, and teaches the reader how to read it (the book's quite twisty in presentation, in a postmodern lit-crit style). I bounced off Insurrecto a few years ago without loving it (though in revisiting my own journals I learned that I apparently quite loved the first fifty pages), and the more recent (at least in the United States) novel has broken my brain or something because I'm entranced.
Leaving aside the parts of this argument not worth dealing with (that is, most of them), you make the fundamental carbrain error. How do you think interstates, suburban development, and countless square miles of public roads and public parking came to be? The answer (and it's an extremely easy one to find because it's less than a hundred years old) is massive amounts of public investment. There's no universe in which virtuously libertarian (TM) private money would have done the same thing. So while the midwit impulse is to bifurcate "statism" and "car culture" and call one a "left wing talking point", they are at the very least not exclusive. There's mutual causation, of course, but I have no desire to open that chapter under this comment.
Thanks for the heads-up about that file; I use a similar development setup and have been slacking on wiring Make rules together because I thought I would have to touch my own files. It would be nice if the files Python installed had better timestamps, though. I'm the only one using Make on the team and install some tooling of my own, so have to chain upgrade Pip -> install deps -> install tools in the correct order. I'm not sure how to automate that order without running all three steps every time.
I live in a suburb north of Dallas and on a short walk can see footpaths at the end of cul-de-sacs, former paths walled off with bushes, and former paths walled off with brick. The places where you can see the old sidewalk under the brick wall are particularly sad, I think. Speculatively, I agree with the people who have commented on the hostility to "undesirables". Here, I think road expansion is at play, too. As the streets these cul-de-sacs face become 4+ lane 45 MPH roads, the walls become necessary to manage road noise and walking down said road becomes more and more unpleasant. Notably, the brick walls are consistently and obviously low quality, and tend to fall apart until they eventually break at the bottom, sag, collapse, and are replaced. It's a pattern I only saw when I moved here (though I was never properly suburban before that).
No expert on Clojure semantics, but I'm pretty sure what's being discussed is common to almost all runtime environments. When you pass an argument to a function, the function doesn't keep track of the name of whatever you pass, it keeps track of the thing you pass. (A few languages bind late enough that you are essentially passing names during function invocation, but AFAIK not many.) The difference is that when you redefine a function in Clojure, you're not updating the memory location of the old function but updating the function that a given var (one of Clojure's synchronization primitives) points to. The var quote, then, is roughly the equivalent of passing a pointer, while the naked syntax is roughly like passing a dereferenced pointer. I find the "save" language in TFA a bit confusing.
As it happens, you don't need much content to convince people that petty criminals are scum and the only solution is more and meaner cops and prisons. After all, the retail lobby says so!
The answer is that the stores claim shoplifting is way up and costing them immense amounts of money. As always, the only citations are the corporations and their lobbying group. It's standard tough-on-crime sophistry.
I don't think we agree that much.
> And I think [starting with anthropology] makes zero sense, since the goals, structure and size of hunter-gatherers bands and large work organizations are not even remotely comparable.
The relative size of these groups are obviously different.
The relative structure is exactly what is under discussion.
Relative goals: Now we're getting somewhere. There may be some people who "just want to code or get my brilliant ideas accepted without further discussion", but that doesn't seem particularly interesting to me. I - and I believe many other people - are interested in a society which achieves goals other than individual aggrandizement or increased production. Anthropology provides a perspective on what groups of people valued and to which degree they flourished. I suppose I might just be a simpleton, but supporting the weak and elderly read to me as rather worthy pursuits, not to mention hard problems.
I can't speak to most of your comment, as I'm almost totally unfamiliar with Newport's work. And I might be reading too much into the New Yorker piece, though a glance at his Wikipedia page confirms that Newport works on distributed systems...
> In this particular article, the hunter-gatherer remote work/lifestyle parallel is so forced as to be simply puzzling. First, hunter-gatherer groups were small and required very little coordination, whereas modern companies, when they are larger than a few hundred individuals (I am generous, I might say larger than a few dozen) require coordination overhead--being "on the same" page is quite important--which completely changes group dynamics.
I think that's part of the point. We've moved to a society where large-scale coordination is the norm, but, just like distributed computing, that coordination is a hard problem to solve. Who's to say that the management techniques we tend to implement are the best ones? There are certainly many workers who feel as if work is getting worse, and metrics which point to certain things getting worse or plateauing while capital-P Production rises.
I'm suspicious of easy answers about when humanity had it figured out or simple prescriptions, but if we are interested in evaluating the relatively young modern regime, there are worse places to start than anthropology.
People call themselves all kinds of things. I fail to see why I should disregard good ideas because someone cynically used the same name for a bad thing.