_wc0m

8 yıl öncediscuss

> I myself am a print debugger

In Rust, everyone is a print debugger. The only thing that really goes wrong in normal code (once it compiles) is "why is this value not what I expect?". Dropping down into GDB is way overkill.

_wc0m

8 yıl öncediscuss

Don’t let the language of capitalism mystify you. These companies have shareholders and management. The profits they make go directly to these people. They are the ones getting rich at the expense of everyone else, not some abstract legal entity.

_wc0m

8 yıl öncediscuss

I agree this article isn't as terrible as average. Going vegetarian and cycling to work once a week might make you feel good but it ain't gonna make a difference. It's a political problem. It needs a political solution.

Agitate and vote for the most left-wing party you can (that has a realistic chance of winning/influencing an election). Campaign for them to institute a ban on fossil fuels. Protest. Climb smokestacks. Make headlines. Break the law. If you work in the media, subvert their agenda as much as possible. Capitalism is crisis.

Of course, the BBC would never state these things. But given how little has been achieved in the last 40 years by playing by the rules, at this point they are obviously necessary, if not sufficient.

_wc0m

8 yıl öncediscuss

Such a thing is not possible, because news is not neutral. Specifically, the decision of what is newsworthy is not neutral. I understand that certain US papers - NYT? - are considered mostly value-free in their reporting, but from my (left wing) perspective they appear highly ideological.

I have some sympathy for UK newspaper attitudes that "we have a point of view and we're proud of it". The fact that they are all terrible rags written by the worst kind of hacks is a separate problem.

As for sibling argument that the FT have no agenda, well, the clue is in the name. It's written for upper management. The fact that such people don't need or want their news as heavily filtered as their underlings is more an expression of the requirements of capital that anything else. Upper management can't afford ideological flights of fancy when they need to keep the system running.

_wc0m

8 yıl öncediscuss

"I drew an upward sloping curve and a downward sloping curve that meet in the middle, and therefore socialism cannot work."

The 2008 crash called for a massive reassessment of the political and cultural status of economics. It required honest economists to recognize their profession not as a neutral description of the world but as a tool for the powerful to exercise dominion over the rest of us. But "cognitive dissonance doesn't work like that", especially when doing so would mean giving up prestige, lucrative consulting opportunities, the ear of the government. For some reason, those other social sciences don't seem to get invited to nearly such lavish parties...

Of course, many people within and without the profession have been making this argument for decades, since way before 2008. But funny thing, the way power works is - those sort of people are never listened to. Why would that change now?

Edit: For a nice overview of these arguments I recommend the book "Economists and the Powerful" from 2012.

_wc0m

8 yıl öncediscuss

Ought to be good, site was designed by the creator of Flask :)

_wc0m

8 yıl öncediscuss

I've been using 'actix-web' in anger for the last month or so and I just want to echo that it is an amazingly fast and fully-featured project.

I smiled when reading this post because I absolutely recognize the euphoria of carrying out a world-changing refactor and having it work first time. If this is what the future of backend development feels like, sign me up!

_wc0m

8 yıl öncediscuss

MongoDB has successfully played the 'hype first, features later' strategy. Now it is well on the way to being a decent swiss-army-knife database.

The RethinkDB retrospective[0] contains a lot of insight into how MongoDB has succeeded despite being vastly inferior on a technical level back when it first launched. I have to admit them a certain respect for executing their strategy so successfully.

Choice quote:

Every time MongoDB shipped a new release and people congratulated them on making improvements, I felt pangs of resentment. They’d announce they fixed the BKL, but really they’d get the granularity level down from a database to a collection. They’d add more operations, but instead of a composable interface that fits with the rest of the system, they’d simply bolt on one-off commands. They’d make sharding improvements, but it was obvious they were unwilling or unable to make even rudimentary data consistency guarantees.

But over time I learned to appreciate the wisdom of the crowds. MongoDB turned regular developers into heroes when people needed it, not years after the fact. It made data storage fast, and let people ship products quickly. And over time, MongoDB grew up. One by one, they fixed the issues with the architecture, and now it is an excellent product. It may not be as beautiful as we would have wanted, but it does the job, and it does it well.

[0] http://www.defmacro.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html

_wc0m

9 yıl öncediscuss

Rent is an amazingly effective means of redistributing wealth upwards. I have easily paid over £100k rent in my life, always to people substantially richer than I am.

Always enjoyed this Churchill quote - from 1909!

Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains -- and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived.

_wc0m

9 yıl öncediscuss

Completely agree with this. The post where Martin derides modern, type-safe languages (Kotlin and Swift) [0] was just unbelievable to me.

"Ask yourself why we are trying to plug defects with language features. The answer ought to be obvious. We are trying to plug these defects because these defects happen too often.

Now, ask yourself why these defects happen too often. If your answer is that our languages don’t prevent them, then I strongly suggest that you quit your job and never think about being a programmer again; because defects are never the fault of our languages. Defects are the fault of programmers. It is programmers who create defects – not languages."

Arrgh! Until we get out of this ridiculous, macho, victim-blaming mindset, software development will be stuck in the relative dark ages. More, better, safer languages, please!

[0] http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2017/01/11/TheDarkPath....

_wc0m

10 yıl öncediscuss

I await a bikeshed about the precise meaning of bikeshed.

_wc0m

10 yıl öncediscuss

I'll be the unfashionable person that agrees with you, then.

Most developers (workers in general) at worst are merely pointless. I think you could easily make the argument that working in banking (/oil/marketing/think tanks/...) is actively harmful and that the smarter you are, the more damage you can do.

There is no iron law that says that just because you turn up on time, work hard and internalize your organization's goals, that the world wouldn't be a better place if you had just stayed in bed.

_wc0m

10 yıl öncediscuss

I spent a lot of time learning new languages and filling in my missing computer-science education. You can do a lot in 3 months if you have no distractions! I was probably there 60 - 70 hours a week and have never managed to hit such a sweet spot of motivation, inspiration and productivity before or since. My PhD was a colossal waste of time in comparison. Actually it made me totally re-evaluate my ideas about education in general.

A random selection from memory:

  * Emulator and debugger for a particular embedded hardware (MSP430)
  * Website that scraped Rosetta Code and displayed it in a less-annoying form
  * Genetic algorithm for graph problems
  * Nand2Tetris course
  * Two weeks trying and mostly failing to learn Haskell (took me another year to really 'get' it)
  * All sorts of other fun/dumb stuff. Boggle solver! Endless project Euler problems! Super Meat Boy!

_wc0m

10 yıl öncediscuss

Recurse center (nee Hackerschool) changed my life.

I was a miserable PhD student, playing around with poor-quality datasets, battling office politics and learning a bit of Python on the side. Saw Recurse Center as an opportunity to see if I might fit in with a techy crowd and perhaps provide some new inspiration.

Went, loved every minute, met wonderful people, learned loads, had a blast. Got home, quit my PhD, quickly landed a developer job and haven't looked back since. My only regret is not doing so sooner.

My story is not unusual. Apply to Recurse Center!

Submissions

Why It’s OK to Block Ads (2015)

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