HN user

unlinked_dll

2,533 karma
Posts1
Comments678
View on HN

Good thing we're not sheep or wolves. That's why I alluded to Orwell. The pigs from Animal Farm are a better metaphor.

The senate doesn't exist to protect the will of sheep at the hands of wolves. It exists because 250 years ago, the edit: New Jersey delegation wasn't willing to relinquish its equal power at the Constitutional Convention to a state like Virginia. Its never been about sheep and wolves, it's been about the political power of a political class that sought to concentrate as much of it as possible for themselves at the expense of others.

If you want a better way to look at it, it's a dozen wolves convincing a dozen sheep that the wolves should have twice the voting power on dinner because they have a bigger grazing area.

No, they're right. We have 53/435 (12.18%) of the House, which is roughly equal to our proportion of the total population (40mm/330mm, 12.12%, numbers will change with the census).

The "at least one" rep has a bigger impact on some of the medium/small size states. My point was more on the senate/electoral college.

I don't agree with that categorization of water issues in CA, but that's off topic.

And having proportional seating in the House isn't particularly meaningful, when it takes both the Senate and the Presidency to drive policy. Dirt doesn't vote, and frankly I don't see any argument for less than proportional representation that isn't predicated on the notion that some people are more equal than others. Any weighting of the voices can be done in the debate forum, but at the ballot box the only fair way to distribute power is equally. That goes for all levels of our representative democracy.

No system is perfect, it's just about making one that's more perfect. And I would strongly argue that our bicameral government designed by slave owners 250 years ago has both been continuously eroded (they never planned for the Executive and Congress to be in cahoots!), and could be drastically improved by expanding on the 9th/10th amendments and being reformed into a unicameral legislature and abolishing the electoral college.

Governor Newsom refers to California as a "nation state" about once a week, in case the author was wondering. He's used that language quite often.

I'm totally ok with it, so long as the Federal government remains impotent and balks at California's efforts to manage itself, while simultaneously being run by the party of "states rights." Purely in spite of the lack of leadership and outright derision for our needs as a state, regardless of being home to over a tenth of the population and being our breadbasket and technological power house.

I know not all Californians agree on everything, but I think we can all come together and recognize that we do have to look out for our state as if it was an independent nation these days. Because the Feds aren't going to help us when we need it, just tax us and tell us we can't have proportional representation.

If this were true we wouldn't have done so much research into programming languages over the last 50 years.

PL design is not a problem to solve, it's the study of the way to express problems and their solutions. As long as their are new problems and ways to solve them, we'll find new ways to improve PL designs.

No, it's just that a prolific rust contributor made a blog post and then a follow up and things have been heated in the community a bit (I lurk a bit).

The fuss isn't over what the syntax should be, but whether it should be changed at all. The proposal isn't even an RFC, just a blog post and some discussion threads. I think the proposal made good points about the ergonomics of error handling. I think the community might just be a little stir crazy with the quarantine, and talking about a syntax change that upends the much loved Result idiom rustled some feathers.

FWIW it is a purely syntactical change that adds sugar, the underlying mechanism does not change. The "hacks" for not having exceptions are strictly superior to having exceptions, at least in my opinion because the error monad is both opt-in on the caller side and opt-out on the callee, it does not include non local returns (errors don't cause the program to jump up the stack, like C++ exceptions, or any need to pass down the exception handler or pass up a continuation), they support all sorts of wonderful combinators that exceptions don't play nicely with, and unless explicitly disabled by a binary author the stack will always unwind and RAII patterns observed. The issues with exceptions are well documented.

I don't really want to go through the laundry list of issues I have because none are critical, just the software is very rough around the edges on Linux. It just feels less than flushed out, and I've had a million little problems and bugs that I've reported and never heard anything back (as a paying user!).

And comments like this usually come from people with a warped concept of money and funding. But it doesn't help to comment on the nature of a poster because you don't know much about them.

The comment is not on the necessity of money but the amount. I legitimately can not fathom why AirBnb needs that much money to run a service business on top of a custom app and website when the fundamental complexity of the business (the particular nuances of local markets, their regulatory/compliance needs, etc) has always been a second thought to their management and trawling for articles, it does not seem like they need that much money to continue. Particularly since regulatory bodies and courts have closed worldwide.

Why does AirBnb need a billion dollars?

I can't find anything suggesting they're spending more than $100mm on their ongoing litigation, the technology isn't particularly novel or complex, is the rest just going to compliance or to pay for previous commitments?

Just seems like an absurd amount of money. That's like one year of revenue for them.

I think the tone of this post is insufferable, and the arguments have little merit presented this way.

The alternative suggested is also non ideal, since array declaration/indexing is semantically different than a function call, not all languages have method calls, not all languages have postfix method calls, I can think of a few ways to break that syntax (what if the type has a call operator and indexing operator?), and it is hypocritical.

The problem with <> is that they are used elsewhere. If you use [] by sacrificing arrays, () will cause problems because they're used elsewhere.

The lowest friction solution would be to introduce a new two character bracket. How about <: or :>? (: :)? I don't know but writing about it in that tone won't get anyone to do something different.

Rust uses the "turbo fish" to get around this. Your example wouldn't compile unless a and b where valid variable names.

    a::<b> (c) 
Is how you instantiate a generic. It's not that ugly. Bigger problem is value type generics/const generics where you want to do some logic like
     a<b > c>

what about Spirited Away?

4K makes cheaply animated content look cheap. Sometimes that's ok, other times viewers want more.

Another example outside anime is Fantasia 2000 on Disney+. That kind of content requires high fidelity. Disney+ looks and sounds bad and it harms the content.

I think it's fantastic Netflix is doing what they can to make fidelity a competitive advantage for content creators, especially the ones that can't spend as much on it.

Is Eric Yuan a US citizen? He wasn't born or educated here so I don't know he considers himself American, and a significant amount of his company's product development is not done in America.

Before this sounds anti-immigrant, I'm the product of immigrants like most Americans and I think the qualifier for being American is considering oneself American and having citizenship or on the path to get it.

I think your starting point is already flawed. Scale is needed for high value liquidity events which is needed for ROI to investors and employees compensated with equity.

If you realign the goal to return maximum value to your employees as soon as possible, then you can align incentives to maximize the creation and growth of markets to sustainably capture value and give it to the people that made it possible.

So just don't take VC money and build a company to give back to your employees as much as possible as soon as possible and do it without competing directly in any existing market or trying to take existing market share. Sounds tough.

I'd offer a different take.

Users want to run your software on their system. You don't want to write software for their system, you want to write it for all systems. The output impedance of the developer and input impedance of the users is a function of how easy it is to write the app for all users and use it by any individual user. Optimal power delivery is achieved when I/O impedances are matches low. Efficiency is achieved at lower impedances.

JS/HTML/CSS is currently the optimal solution in that context.

UI isn't dead, it's more alive than ever. But since what works is what can get my product to the most people the fastest is on a web stack, that's the thing that's going to be used. And since the web stack is high impedance to begin with, anything I can do to lower that in terms of framework is going to be in demand, hence all the diversity we see.

Most unions don't have "union" in their name, I don't think it's an issue of nomenclature. People know which organizations can be colloquially referred to as a labor union.

That said people just have problems understanding how unions work. It's a collective voice. How that voice is used is up to the union members. If you want that to include gate keeping and seniority protections that's up to the members. If you want it to be a political lobby, same thing.

Associated types are slightly different than generic types.

    trait State {
        type NextState;
        fn transition(self) -> Self::NextState;
     } 
In this example one consumes the current state to yield the next state (one could use From/TryFrom, but I don't think that makes sense semantically, imo).

The advantage of this approach is that if you design your State types such that they can only be constructed by transitioning from a previous state, you cannot write code where your program is accidentally in an invalid state. You also never need to match against an enum.

I disagree with the implementation, State should be a trait with NextState as an associated type. This makes things cumbersome when it can be a set of types, but it makes excellent use of the type system and ownership patterns of Rust. Edit: and the type state pattern http://cliffle.com/blog/rust-typestate/

As an aside, if you want to dive in with FSMs and automata theory (as well as some basic language topics) go read Sipser's book, "Introduction to the Theory of Computation." You'll go from logic to state machines to understanding why Turing Machines are so dope in a few dozen pages. The math isn't bad.

I've seen the same thing. Most recently at a trade show.

That said unions help more than they hurt, in my opinion. It's also pointless to paint all unions with the same brush like that, you worked with a group of people that had bad management. That's can happen in any organization, not just unions.

Not they're not all great all the time but I think the Hollywood unions are something we as tech workers could model ourselves after. You still negotiate your own salary and such but certain benefits like pension/retirement/healthcare (which are great at scale but hurt employers and employees at smaller businesses) can be amalgamated across the membership.

Like for example just a couple years ago the writers unions got into a spat with their agents over double dipping with production companies and not representing the interests of their clients. That kind of bargaining power can be wielded to fix institutional problems across an industry, but it doesn't have to come at the cost of individual gains - the writers still negotiate their own compensation and sign their own deals.

Unions can be a great way for industries to self regulate imo.

All respect friend, but I feel you're the one who are gravely mistaken about what a company is or how it should work.

We're not talking about capitalism, but corporatism, and corporations are social organizations and to understand them is not to understand supply and demand but humans and how we gather.

The decision to cut pay or lay off employees is never amoral. It's an example of the trolley problem. It is wholly irrational to think a business decision that impacts other human beings and their livelihood as amoral. If it were amoral, managers wouldn't lose sleep at night when they look at the org chart and make hard decisions when push comes to shove.

I don't think that this particular decision was evil. I think the attitude you express about how companies "should" or "do" operate is both wrong and at the heart of evil and immoral companies.

It's fine if you think I don't understand capitalism, because what I'm talking about is empathy.