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galonk

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My favorite story from the book. Working on hardware, the engineers would often have problems where the whole machine would crash because some signal happend one nanosecond too early or one microsecond too late.

Eventually one of the engineers broke. He left and never came back. He left a note on his desk reading "I am going to live on a farm in Vermont, and I will no longer deal with any unit of time shorter than a season."

I don't know how it works, but it seems very odd that serialization/reflection wouldn't work with AOT... the information you need is there in memory either way, isn't it?

Palimpsest 4 years ago

I was introduced to this word by the Carl Sagan novel Contact, and I’ve always remembered it.

AA sounds like a horrible company. They had a design legacy from when their logo and identity were designed by Massimo Vignelli, but they threw it away and didn't seem to have any concept of its value. Their website has terrible design and usability. When a blogger posted an article about how bad it was, one of the designers at AA reached out anonymously and said they understood his criticisms and that they were working to make the site better. AA searched their mail servers to find that employee and fired them for... caring, I guess?

I didn’t know adding text to the submission would show up as a comment so it looks like I’m the author. Sorry about that!

A month ago I was diagnosed with tongue cancer. This is my journey of regret, joy, anger, and inter-species body modification.

I don’t know why floats aren’t included, but any float can be easily represented by an int with same bits, or a bytestring, using the struct module to convert between them, so there are clear workarounds.

A lot of people sing BB's praises but I never had a good experience with them. The client was always slow, buggy, and resource hungry, and its UI is terrible. They got shirty with me for reporting bugs when I was using a macOS beta. And finally, at some point even though nothing about my computer changed (it was a Mac Mini, what was going to change), I got a message saying some security/copy protection system had detected that my computer was "different", and I had to un-install and re-install the entire app to fix it (there apparently being no easier way to unset a flag). I uninstalled and skipped the second part.

Instead of using BB, get a Synology/Qnap/FreeNAS box to backup all your stuff locally, and back that up to another service (e.g. Glacier or Synology's own C2).

I love this proposal. I think I would use it too much at first, and the pull it back to using it a reasonable amount :)

I've wished that Python had something similar to C#'s LINQ, where a user could express a query using familiar list comprehension syntax, but instead of the comprehension actually evaluating, my search library could somehow receive the AST and use it to build an optimized query. ORM libraries often play tricks with dunder methods to achieve a similar DSL feel. This could give me something very close to that.

I'm also drooling over the parser example, as someone who maintains a parsing library. I support building a parser from a a grammar file currently because doing it in code is a bit clumsy, but the example makes it look pretty.

There's also countless times people have had a great idea for "with" blocks, but it turns out it's not really possible because it would require the with statement to analyze/capture the child statements inside. This proposal gives you exactly that.

The syntax isn't spectacular, but for the most part I can't think of anything much better. I do think the "sibling statement" syntax will be hard to understand visually. I would make it start with a @ since it's like a decorator for the next statement:

@log! print("Hello")

That video is great, it was linked on HN a while ago and I watched the whole thing even though it's not my area at all. Really interesting :)

The argument that browsers should stop trying to become an OS on top of the OS (e.g. webUSB) deserves better than this overly emotional rant.

The browser that has been holding the line in this respect, Safari, is dismissed without explanation.

I want to echo this, it's disappointing, but I'm thankful to Raph and the team for all the work they put into it. I had dreams of being able to write an editor where I could concentrate on making a cool UI in a different language/framework and have Xi do all the hard stuff.

I think LSP will end up being the "good enough" solution for niche languages, while popular languages get dedicated IDEs/mega-plugins, a la the various language flavours of IDEA, XCode, etc.

I wrote a Python library that was pretty popular at one time. I gave a talk on it at PyCon, at one point it was in the top 200 most downloaded packages on PyPI.

Since my employer told me I was no longer allowed to work on it at work, I have felt quite a lot of guilt about all but abandoning fixing bugs and reading the mailing list. I've been working on a "next generation" version, almost a rewrite, but I don't see a clear path for releasing it in a way that helps people still using the current version.

It may be self-serving, but I am really going to try to take this essay to heart, and not beat myself up everytime a weekend goes by that I don't spend working on my project.

Note that the instructions say you can have either the normal install ISO or the Install-Dev ISO in the optical drive, but this does not seem to be correct -- using the Install-Dev ISO causes an error trying to read /etc/init. You need to use the normal install ISO instead.

"SapphireDb also supports running in an NLB with multiple instances and scales very good."

In English, when speaking of actions you must say "well" instead of "good", ie. "scales very well". While there are a million weird things about English, this particular mistake is used as a cultural marker of "childish" or "low-intelligence" speech, so you probably want to fix it ASAP.

Also what is an NLB???