mapreduce

Why is it so that every so often one of these feel-good LinkedIn-style posts make it to the front page? Is there so much demand for banality on this site? I come here to read good tech articles or articles that stimulate my curiosity and it is sad to see these articles upvoted to the top when so many other good articles at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest continue to languish.

It was on the front page ... it hit the top spot. Various people in the community clearly did think it met the bar.

It was on the front page. It hit the top spot. Then it got flagged. Many people in the community clearly did think it was clickbait and did not meet the bar!

If ever you make a mistake, never, ever write it up.

Sure you can write it up! But post it to maybe, Reddit?

The HN audience expects certain standard of quality and insight in the article if the article is on the front page.

Here the community has voted that this article does not meet the bar. I can't speak for others but for me this article is too obvious and uninteresting.

Instead of complaining about something that didn't happen here (nobody said the OP was stupid), maybe learn from the community feedback and refrain from posting articles that don't meet the community expectations?

Don't people RTFM anymore?

Is this another "changeme is valid base64" moment?

Come on! Base64 has been around for 30 years!

Ah! Misunderstood your original comment. My apologies! Yes, I am with you when you question the usefulness of the multiplication syntax.

I prefer simplicity and consistency in a programming language grammar, syntax and semantics as I advocated above. So yes I'd be happy to lose that multiplication syntax. It is not worth it.

If you’re already trusting it for your IP address, you might as well trust it with the current UTC time

I don't follow! How does trusting DHCP with IP address automatically mean I should trust it with the current UTC time?

Time requires higher degree of trust than IP.

I may not care what my IP address looks like but I might care a lot about what the current UTC time is and I might want this to come from a more trustworthy device.

What problems is it solving that require the confusion that it generates?

I think I answered that already. It keeps the language spec consistent and simpler.

Imagine the complexity you have to add to the language spec to say that when we write [] we deal with the reference to this list except in the multiplication syntax a = [[]] * 5 where the inner [] is not a reference to the list but the list value! Such special case will make the language both inconsistent and harder to understand for experienced programmers.

that is worth the complexity tradeoff of people often using it subtly wrong?

I don't think that makes the complexity tradeoff worth it. This is the kind of tradeoff that makes the language implementation, reference and semantics more and more complex. Unfortunately Python has a lot of such complexities already. We don't need more of it. Such complexity hurts the creation of completing implementations.

IMHO programming language specifications and implementations should be simple and consistent so that competing implementations can be developed easily.

people often using it subtly wrong?

I think that... you know... before writing serious software, these people need to roll up their sleeves and just learn the damn language. Just learn what references are and how they work in Python. It's not that hard. It is most definitely easier than adding a sphagetti monster to the compiler make it bend to the will of programmers who can't be bothered to read the tutorial. I mean this gotcha about references is taught in the 4th chapter of the tutorial. Can't developers even bother to RTFM these days before developing serious software with a programming language?

"less than 2 drinks a day"

"less than 2 drinks a day" would be called "moderate drinking" in my culture. I mean if someone is having a drink or two everyday that is moderate drinking already.

Light drinking for us would be like 3 drinks in a week! 4 drinks/week or more gets us into the moderate drinking territory.

Of course they phrased it that way on purpose because implying causality makes their results sound way more important than they are.

How do you know that? I am at a loss to understand how someone on HN can read one sentence and begin drawing conclusions about what other ulterior motives they had while writing the sentence?

Maybe that sentence means exactly what it says and nothing more which is Z is a function of X and Y? Why perform psychoanalysis on that sentence? And if you have to perform psychoanalysis of that sentence, at least substantiate your conclusion by telling us what process you followed to rule out about a 100 other possible ulterior motives and conclude that "makes their results sound way more important than they are" is most definitely the ulterior motive they had?

Why should somebody try to convince you in either direction?

Because we are on a tech website and as good samaritans we want to help each other out by sharing the information, knowledge, projects, tools or recommendations we have?

Real LaTeX users don't use LaTeX to write documents.

Really? That's a bold claim. Got any source or stats for that?

I assure you I am a real LaTeX user and I use LaTeX to write documents. I see everyone around me doing the same.

Like others have said this is hardly Logo.

Turtle graphics != Logo.

Turtle graphics is a tiny tiny subset of Logo.

But let us not miss the forest for the trees. It is still very impressive that the tiny tiny subset of Logo fits in 508 bytes of machine code.

Yeah. I thought HN edits them automatically to remove listicle from headlines but this one slipped through?

(2011) that article. That's like 13 years old. I very well remember 13 years ago the FANG were not filled with middle managers like they are today. Massive cultural shifts in these places since then.

This might sound crazy or stupid but I really want to know if there is some Lisp with manual memory management? I love Lisp syntax. People complain about the parentheses but for me they are a blessing. I like how extremely uniform and regular they look.

But all Lisps I've seen have garbage collectors. If I could find a Lisp with manual memory management, I could ditch C++ in favor of that Lisp. Is there one?

Maybe. but with the same effort one can build a useful language, even adding new ideas that will advance development, which is also fun.

So others must have fun the way you approve of? Otherwise they are having fun wrong?

If the anchor tag already has the URL as text, then will the URL be printed twice?

Like if I've got

  <a href="https://www.google.com/">https://www.google.com/</a>

  https://www.google.com (https://www.google.com)

Also, it's entirely unrelated to the post.

Entirely unrelated to the post? Entirely? The post talks:

"To write Common Lisp code with comfort and still have the ability to interact with REPL, you can choose your favorite IDE"

And then it goes on to provide some recommendations for major editors out there. So the GP is at least a little related to the post?

I did not get the impression of any flame war in the GP. As a Emacs user myself I am well aware that everyone does not like to use Emacs. Many like Vim. I don't see the problem with recommending a Vim setup for Lisp. We need more recommendations like that for different editors to make Lisp programming more attractive to people of all types of technical background.

that documentation doesn't matter and nobody reads it anyway

Did I say that? I don't think so. I said that it is possible to create key mappings without reading 18 chapters of documentation. How? By looking up what we need.

But Emacs users do read the documentation but not necessarily in a linear manner where they must start from Chapter 1 and go all the way to Chapter 18 before they are able to do something. Some people might it read like that. But most people including myself read the parts that matter to us.

Emacs' solution to switching between buffers is harder to use if you want to go between different files you have open.

Are you sure?

If I am on foo.rs and I want to go to bar.rs all I type is C-x b bar and type Enter and done! I find this way easier than hunting and pecking for my tab in VSCode.

but having to read eighteen chapters just to get to make my own keyboard mappings is...

That's a very disingenuous way of deflecting your lack of motivation for learning Emacs on 18 chapters of documentation. I'm sure you code in some programming language, maybe multiple of them even. I'm sure each such programming language comes with tons of documentation. Do you read the whole language manuals/books before you start doing something useful with it? Or do you just learn the basics and look up what you need as you figure it out?

The basics of Emacs are easily accessible from C-h t and that's the first thing Emacs shows in its welcome screen when you launch it the first time. It takes less time to finish that C-h t tutorial than it takes to learn the basics of a new programming language.

Nobody really reads 18 chapters of documentation before making keyboard mappings. I make keyboard mappings and I read 0 chapters of the documentation. 0. Zero. How? Just like you do anything else in software these days? Looking it up, jumping directly to the documentation I needed to learn how to do key maps.

There's nothing special about doing things in Emacs. You can learn Emacs just the way you learn any programming language. What might be different about learning Rust or Python might be that most people find themselves motivated to learn it so they are motivated enough to look up what they need. But many people are not so motivated to learn what they perceive as merely an editor. If you do not have the motivation to learn Emacs the same way, that's fine. But blaming it on the large documentation does not seem fair.

Sorry, couldn't find the RSS feed. Mind pointing me to it?

This absolutely happens to me. Happy to know I'm not the only one.

But in a physical book, I often remember that a phrase was at the top or middle or left side of a page, or that I was sitting in a particular chair when I read it.

Exactly! And for reasons I cannot explain this helps me with better recall too! Like when I remember something I read, I know roughly where in the book that stuff was physically printed and what other stuff were around it and how they relate to each other.

With ebook too I still know how things relate to each other but the clarity feels much less. I can see it much less in my mind's eye. I don't know why! And it drives me mad!

Appreciate the link. Looks great. Thanks! Alas this post did not get the votes to get more links like this.

>> A face is a unique identifier.

> Guess you’ve never heard of twins?

Guess you’ve never heard of names? Or date of birth? Personal doesn’t mean unique.

Your parent commenter is contesting the "A face is a unique identifier" part. They are not contesting "A face is personal". Of course face should be PII but at the same time it is not a unique identifier, so your parent commenter is correct and you are correct too. But you are replying to an objection that was never made.

Frankly nothing about this title seems clickbaity to me. The word "Joy" can be ambiguous here is the real issue.

Is this type of comments really in the spirit of HN discussions? From HN guidelines:

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage.

I find this type of comments in many articles which goes like "I thought this article would be X but turned out to be Y". Sure you thought that! Sometimes the title does not tell the full story to everyone. Sometimes it does. It would be nice if it always did. But there is ambiguity in natural languages.

To quote HN, "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." If it's good for HN, it's good for me.

They could have said 150 years, but then, where's the point

I know jokes are generally discouraged on this forum but this one is clever and done really well with good taste. Seems appropriate for the kind of crowd we have here. Very well done, sir!