HN user

autarch

3,830 karma

I'm Dave Rolsky. Also see https://blog.urth.org and https://github.com/autarch.

Posts36
Comments799
View on HN
render.com 2y ago

Render Enforces Access Controls with Go Generics

autarch
1pts0
blog.urth.org 3y ago

Naming Your Binary Executable Releases

autarch
22pts0
blog.urth.org 4y ago

Restoring Window Positions in Gnome After Switching Monitor Inputs

autarch
2pts0
blog.urth.org 4y ago

Software Job Search 2022 Retrospective: Coding Challenges

autarch
2pts3
blog.urth.org 4y ago

Job Search 2022 Update: Week 1

autarch
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: Have you used resume or comp negotiation services like levels.fyi?

autarch
6pts0
www.vox.com 4y ago

Is therapy the best way to make the world happier?

autarch
13pts4
blog.urth.org 4y ago

What Do I Want from My Next Job?

autarch
1pts0
blog.urth.org 5y ago

Security Issues in Perl IP Address Distros

autarch
3pts3
blog.urth.org 5y ago

What I did on my winter vacation

autarch
1pts0
blog.urth.org 6y ago

Comparing Code Quality Meta Tools

autarch
2pts0
www.filfre.net 6y ago

The Shareware Scene, Part 1: The Pioneers

autarch
3pts0
slatestarcodex.com 6y ago

Book Review: Hoover

autarch
1pts0
jvns.ca 6y ago

Questions you can ask about compensation

autarch
6pts2
blog.urth.org 6y ago

I Weigh Way Less

autarch
1pts6
www.antipope.org 6y ago

Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menace?

autarch
1pts0
blog.urth.org 7y ago

A Technical Hiring Process Revisited

autarch
2pts0
apenwarr.ca 7y ago

Factors in authentication

autarch
55pts11
www.filfre.net 7y ago

The Designer’s Designer

autarch
4pts1
apenwarr.ca 7y ago

XML, blockchains, and the strange shapes of progress

autarch
3pts1
thecodist.com 8y ago

How Often Should You Ship?

autarch
2pts2
blog.codinghorror.com 8y ago

To Serve Man, with Software

autarch
20pts1
apenwarr.ca 8y ago

An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage

autarch
3pts0
randomascii.wordpress.com 8y ago

Hey Synaptics, Can You Please Stop Polling

autarch
232pts104
blog.urth.org 9y ago

A Technical Hiring Process

autarch
2pts0
blog.urth.org 10y ago

Tech Interviewer Theory

autarch
2pts0
www.alfiekohn.org 10y ago

Clicking for Love – The Curious, Odious, Hilarious World of Online Dating

autarch
92pts84
medium.com 10y ago

Understandably Cause for Alarm

autarch
1pts0
blog.urth.org 11y ago

Something at Netflix Is Seriously Broken

autarch
2pts4
news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

Ask HN: Hiring Remotely and US Tax Nexuses

autarch
9pts9

I love both the Murderbot books and Piranesi. I think they're excellent for _very_ different reasons.

With Murderbot, the "corpos control everything" scifi future setting is nothing new. I think the brilliance is in its portrayal of the main character, primarily through its inner voice. Murderbot is a really unique character and it is written very well.

Conversely, in Piranesi, the main character is basically a cipher. He doesn't know who is, and we don't learn a lot about him or his psychology for most of the book. I felt like he was mostly there to let us experience the world, which as you put it was otherworldly and quite unique. The brilliance of the book is the prose and the world, not the character.

But like I said, I think comparing anything to Dune is pretty tough. Dune is a landmark work that still influences modern writers, and that modern audiences still enjoy reading. The recent movies have translated it to the big screen and captured an even larger audience (an amazing feat given how weird the books are).

Very, very few SFF books have had a similar impact. There's Tolkien, who is arguably the most influential SFF writer of all time. What other SFF works from the 60s or earlier are still as widely read and influential as Dune and LotR? Almost none, except Le Guin's Earthsea books, which barely squeaks in with a 1969 release for the first book.

Murderbot won the Hugo for best novel in 2021. This is the first _novel_ in the series. The previous publications were novellas, and so not in the same category. I suspect that the award may have been in part for the series and not this book specifically. We see this in other years, for example with N.K. Jemisin winning the Nebula for Stone Sky, the third book in a trilogy. Was Stone Sky better than the first two, or was this just a way to recognize a great overall series?

I really like that the Hugos added a Best Series category in 2017 to hopefully avoid this sort of thing. It seems like a great series is a different beast than a great single novel.

Murderbot was 2021. I would defend it as a winner, but take a look at other recent years:

* 2020 - A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine - a science fiction story set in a future Aztec space empire - quite inventive and odd. The sequel won in 2022.

* 2024 - Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh - basically a story about growing up as a terrorist in a sci-fi setting, with some wild turns.

* 2025 - The Tainted Cup by Robert Bennett Jackson - a very bizarre Holmes & Watson take set in a land constantly invaded by sea kaiju, and where there's "magic" (or is it science) based on harvesting the dead kaiju's bodies.

These are all excellent books, each of which has something different to recommend them.

Are they as good as Dune? Well, it's very hard to say _now_. Assuming humans still exist in 60 years, will they still read them like we read Dune 60 years from its publication? Maybe.

Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land won in 1961. I've read it, and I don't think it's aged very well. It's certainly not Dune.

How many people are still reading the 1969 winner, John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar? I _have_ read it. It's good, but nowhere close to Dune. And how about 1978's winner, Gateway by Frederik Pohl? It's ... fine. It's not even in the same category as Dune, IMO.

Dune is an outlier among _all_ winners. It's one of the best SF books of all time, with a voice that still seems fresh today. Most Hugo (and Nebula) just don't live up to this standard. There are a few that do, like Left Hand of Darkness, Ender's Game, Hyperion, and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (better than Dune, IMO). But those are outliers just like Dune.

We've done the same thing in my job. I think what they're saying is that rather than passing/returning `SomeStruct` and having it maybe be optional, they either pass `SomeStruct`, with a rule that it's never nil, _or_ they pass `Option[*SomeStruct]`. Then anything that deals with optional types is forced to explicitly check.

This is exactly how Rust works, except there it's built into the compiler, and there's no such as nil in most code.

Imagine that you are a consultant. You get a call that starts with, "Hi, this is Joe Schmoe and Schmoe Law Firm. I need a new billing system. Can you build me one?"

And you respond by saying that you can, but you need to do a _lot_ of work with him to spec this billing system out. You can't just build "a new billing system" without any more details. You tell him that this will take many hours of work between the two of you where you ask him questions, write a spec, get his feedback, and repeat that a number of times.

At this point, he says "wow, that sounds like a ton of of work for me just get started", and he gives up.

AI does not fix any of this, and this is the thing that I think most people will not want to do, and that's why I think this blog post is making a very good point. The amount of work it takes to build a new software system, even with a super competent programmer as a partner, is still quite significant. And it requires thinking about hundreds of tiny little details in a way that drives a lot of people nuts. They will only do it if they _really_ have to do it.

I'd love to see this for Taiwan. I'm here now (on my Nth trip where N >= 11), and my impression is that 7-11 is the clear winner in all the cities I've been to, followed by Family Mart and then some stragglers like Hilife and OK Mart (it's ok).

My personal favorite is probably Family Mart, because they have multiple very delicious vegan rice balls to choose from.

How I Left YouTube 7 months ago

If you think the engineer interview process is painful, try interviewing to be CEO of any company. I guarantee it will be _much_ more involved.

What Killed Perl? 8 months ago

What's an example of a language that's as bad as Perl, that's used as widely as Perl was, that's still in use today?

PHP? I don't know how widely it's still used, but I'd guess it's more widely used than Perl. Also, PHP is not "as bad" as Perl. It's much, much, much worse. It's Perl without the charm.

What Killed Perl? 8 months ago

My main complaints about Go are not that it needs more obscure syntax. The biggest problem with Go is basically that the core of the language's syntax is special, and only accessible to the compiler. This goes hand in hand with the language not offering generics out of the gate. This means that things like slices, maps, channels, etc. are all special. You cannot implement anything similar that uses the same syntax (even now that generics exist).

This lack of flexibility means that it's impossible to experiment with replacements for built-ins, and the lack of generics out of the gate meant so many things were simply impossible (like useful iterators).

Compare this to Rust, where almost everything like this is just a trait. If you want to offer a map replacement, you just implement the Index and IndexMut traits.

Overall, I don't think Perl is the best language design. It has some interesting ideas. Go is _also_ not the best language design. Is Rust the _best_? No, but it's better than both Perl and Go, IMO.

What Killed Perl? 8 months ago

I was just saying that they were confused about what was going on with Perl because if the Perl 6 effort. I don't think that they were confused or wrong in their decision making.

What Killed Perl? 8 months ago

True. For whatever reason, these never displaced XS. For wrapping C libraries in particular, it's not clear to me how much Inline::C helps with this. You're still stuck using a lot of Perl C API calls, AFAICT, which I think is the biggest challenge of using XS (I still have nightmares from trying to figure out where and when to add `sv2mortal` in my XS code).

What Killed Perl? 8 months ago

The point where I disagree is I think Perl 6/Raku played a significant role in Perl's decline. It really gave me the perception that they were rudderless and that Perl probably had no future.

I assume you disagree with the blog post, not with my comment, since this is exactly what my comment says too!

What Killed Perl? 8 months ago

I was writing a comment asking if it was really easier. Then I took a look at Cython. Yes, this looks easier than Perl's XS, which I have some experience with! There are ways to do something similar in Perl these days, notably https://metacpan.org/pod/FFI::Platypus. But these are relatively new (starting in the 2010s) compared to the history of Perl, and Cython goes back to the early 2000s.

What Killed Perl? 8 months ago

As a very long-time Perl developer and FOSS contributor, I think this blog post is incorrect about whether Perl 6/Raku was a factor in Perl's decline. I think Perl 6/Raku did a few things that hurt Perl 5:

1. It pulled away folks who would otherwise have spent time improving Perl 5 (either the core or via modules).

2. It discouraged significant changes to the Perl 5 language, since many people figured that it wasn't worth it with Perl 6 just around the corner.

3. It confused CTO/VP Eng types, some of whom thought that they shouldn't invest in Perl 5, since Perl 6 was coming soon. I've heard multiple people in the Perl community discuss hearing this directly from execs.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

Also, even if Perl 6 had never happened the way it did and instead we'd just had smaller evolutions of the language in major versions, I think usage would still have shrunk over time.

A lot of people just dislike Perl's weird syntax and behavior. Many of those people were in a position to teach undergrads, and they chose to use Python and Java.

And other languages have improved a lot or been created in the past 20+ years. Java has gotten way better, as has Python. JavaScript went from "terribly browser-only language" to "much less terrible run anywhere language" with a huge ecosystem. And Go came along and provided an aggressively mediocre but very usable strongly typed language with super-fast builds and easy deploys.

Edit: Also PHP was a huge factor in displacing Perl for the quick and dirty web app on hosted services. It was super easy to deploy and ran way faster than Perl without mod_perl. Using mod_perl generally wasn't possible on shared hosting, which was very common back in the days before everyone got their own VM.

All of those things would still have eaten some of Perl's lunch.

[dead] 8 months ago

I can't tell if this is a joke or not. Is this a real email that someone received?

Talent 9 months ago

FWIW, I don't think he wanted to hide his identity. He talked about just not wanting patients to google his full name and find his blog, as opposed to preventing people who read his blog from finding out his name.

I don't think most airlines allow two suitcases. Generally it's one "bag" (a suitcase or duffel) and one "personal item" (purse, backpack, etc.).

I can think of two instances in the last 10 years where I've stayed at a hotel and had my room become disgustingly full of pot smell from someone else in the hotel. So yes, people smoke in hotels.

That said, I haven't smelled _cigarette_ smoke in a hotel in recent memory.

I do understand the difference, thanks. I think the degree to which it's a scam depends on the employer. Some say they have unlimited vacation and then the work culture discourages using it. Fortunately, that's not the case where I work.

The other benefit of not-unlimited is having it paid out when you leave. But if I had 6 weeks a year PTO, I'd just use it all anyway, so the part where it gets paid out isn't a big deal to me.