HN user

shizzy0

98 karma
Posts7
Comments78
View on HN

I got the lowest of the low MacBooks on a black friday deal years ago for my wife that only had 8GB, thinking the same way. "It'll be fine for her needs." It was more than fine. It was good. Got myself one a month later. I don't know why but RAM is different on macOS.

You can in theory turn off gc but in practice no one does this because nearly everything is written with the assumption that allocations will be cleaned up by the gc. The compiler has no switches to help you run in a non-gc’d state. At best you can control when you run the gc.

Some of the best technical documentation I’ve ever written has straight up lies in it. Granted they were placed there in the service of distilling the most germane portions of the API I was trying to explain. But it made a huge difference once I decided my code in the library didn’t have to be my code in its documentation. I felt a little like a biographical writer who makes a composite character. But honestly I recommend trying it. Lie in your docs if it serves the greater goal of communicating what’s most important. Let the computer labor in the “truth” and its tediums.

Bevy 0.12 3 years ago

I think the test is for this is whether the project is willing to break with the past to _keep_ the api simple, clean, and fast. You're right that is easier for new projects who have no backward compatibility to speak of. From what I've seen bevy has a strong culture of demanding good ergonomics for the users and reducing the api surface, and maybe it's thanks to rust's packaging, but they're very willing to break with the past to get it, which I appreciate.

The nice thing too is with cargo, should you ever commit to bevy, they can break the future, and you don't have to chase a moving target. You can just stick to your version. But they also provide guides to make moving up to the latest and greatest easy. Or at least that's been my experience as a bevy dabbler.

I’ve changed how I use Twitter. It’s now in readonly or reactive mode for me. I may comment and retweet but all new content is now being posted to mastodon. While this seemed hard to want to do at first, mastodon actually has a ton of quality of life improvements like edit your post to fix your typos. I swear I feel like I was in a Stockholm Syndrome with Twitter just accepting that you can’t edit your tweets. Why was that ever acceptable? You can’t add alt text to an image you already uploaded. You must choose to delete a tweet that is maybe gaining traction or live with your typing mistakes. Ugh. Honestly it feels like getting out of a bad relationship. Happy to invest in communities that are outside of Elon’s control.

I was a paying GitHub customer, but they had such a crummy private repo policy at the time (I think only 5 private repos were allowed) it forced me to make poor technical decisions: "I'll delete this github repo, keep my local copy, to open up a slot." I switched all my private repos to gitlab and stopped paying for github and was happier for it.

Later github changed its policy to something saner, but I never switched back to using github for private repos. This decision by gitlab even if it's rescinded, however, might give me the impetus to do so.

I use this style. It’s been very helpful. It feels like a nice scannable breadcrumb compared to my old commit titles. I did have trouble sometimes remembering the categories. Was it “doc” or “docs”? So I changed my git template to show this and my own enshrined categories. One category I added was “excise” for the removal of things.

https://gist.github.com/shanecelis/db3f348288be70e4de4e0f249...

Early on in, I used to write “refactor,doc,feature:” before I realized that one of the practices this is meant to encourage is a commit that does one of the things, not all of them. I’m not very strict about it. I always do the semantic title but if I have some documentation mingled with a refactor, oh well.

It's essentially for efficiency but not merely; it would be impractical to do with partial spends. Transactions are immutable and spend all of their inputs because it's easier to track and verify no double spend has occurred. If you allowed for partial spends, you'd have to trace the ancestry and descendants of all the transactions to verify whether there was enough bitcoin to spend it. This way if you have a transaction and it hasn't been spent since it originated, you know exactly how much can be spent.

I think it's natural to think of addresses as having a certain amount of bitcoin in them like an account at a bank. But bitcoin doesn't actually have accounts with balances. It just has transactions that have yet to be spent. You can calculate the amount of bitcoin that is spendable by an address so it looks like an account, which is what every wallet does but underneath it's just a collection of transactions that point to some address that you have the private key of.

It sucks that GUI scripting is dying on the vine on Mac, but it still sucked even when Apple was trying to support it with AppleScript. It was always kludgey. BeOS seems like the only OS that made apps that were by default scriptable.

Excuse me, are you asking for data? for evidence? We're here to assert our opinions, speculate on what's best, and cite an anecdote—sadly.

The value in a piece of literature has little to do with the individual words it's made from

Literature would be hobbled if one couldn't use certain words without fear of litigation or rent seekers suing them.

software is clearly vastly more than the sum of its algorithmic parts.

But it's all algorithmic parts, and the whole is no less an algorithm because its parts are.

Algorithm + Algorithm = Algorithm

If you want to rely on literature as your software analogy--that the composition of words/algorithms, the expression should be protected--then you're arguing not for patent protection but copyright protection, which we already have, and ridiculously is far better than what writers get. Because we don't have to share the human readable part the source code, just the compiled products. At least with patents one was supposed to disclose something of value.

The interviewer is partly right, and students who have a natural aptitude[1] for programming often recognize this: Code is meaningless. At the application level, you may have something that looks like an image. Underneath, you may represent it with numbers. Numbers, however, are also a fiction represented with bits. The meaning is based entirely on one's interpretation. Creating a mapping between meaningless formalism and meaningful interpretation is the principle obstacle to learning to program.

I understand the point the author is trying to make, and the interviewer in the video has not grasped the above. To answer his concern, ask him what meaning does the letter 'd' have? Next to none, but in composition it can provide quite a lot of meaning. (This is an argument from Hofstadter.)

[1]: I had a study/source for this, but I can't find it.