HN user

wincent

652 karma

Staff Engineer at Datadog, Ex-GitHub, Ex-Facebook

Posts3
Comments113
View on HN

I've been blogging, albeit not consistently, for 25 years or so. I don't even know how many readers I have, because I don't do any analytics.

When I write, it's for me, for the pleasure (and sometimes pain) of ushering thoughts out from the unstable flickering of my consciousness and into the realm of the fixed and concrete word. Well, as "fixed" as these kinds of digital artifacts ever are, I guess.

Sometimes people write to me to share their thoughts about something I wrote, and that's cool,but it's not the reason I'm doing the writing.

Maybe it's Ok to be a little hungry.

This is the key. On evolutionary time scales, human beings have only very recently come to inhabit a world where regularly being able to eat to full satiation (and beyond) is commonplace. Being "a little hungry" is actually the typical condition under which most of our ancestors over many thousands of years have operated. Put an organism evolved to survive amid scarcity in an environment of abundance, and it's going to gain weight unless it comes up with a method for stopping at or before the earliest signs of satiety.

Towards the end:

In addition to vertical partitioning to move database tables, we also use horizontal partitioning (aka sharding). This allows us to split database tables across multiple clusters, enabling more sustainable growth.

I get annoyed because I have to work around C's warts to do what I want, and that is only happening because I think in my language

You "just" have to get to the point where your compiler is written in your own language. This may take a while. Go got there in V1.5:

https://go.dev/doc/go1.5

You can have it clone your dotfiles repo automatically and run a set-up script:

https://docs.github.com/en/codespaces/customizing-your-codes...

I also have a very bespoke dotfiles config that predates Codespaces (https://github.com/wincent/wincent), so I made a thin wrapper around it that makes it work (https://github.com/wincent/dotfiles). For people with less complicated set-ups (ie. basically the entire universe), it is pretty straightforward.

Some related discussion from a few months back (specifically, a critique of hooks): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22995928

FWIW, I think the single tweet that sums up the reason why hooks are the way they are is this: https://twitter.com/sebmarkbage/status/1094093984211787776

A property of Hooks is that it forces you to confront them early and then you just learn patterns that don't have the same issues. I don't know if that is worth the tradeoff, but I stick to the claim that this is the tradeoff.

(That's Sebastian Markbåge, who's basically been chief architect of all things on the core React team for the last 5 years or so.)

I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news.

Browsing HN has never felt productive to me. At times useful, entertaining, informative, thought-provoking, and at others less so, when it can seem annoying, repetitive, pointless and so on. But never "productive".

I had a similar set-up and did some screencasts on it a few years back (link below). It worked well, and was the least-sucky thing out there for plain-text email, but in the end I just got fatigued at continuously having to switch to another viewer (a browser) in order to properly see HTML email, which was ubiquitous. I ran back into Gmail's loving embrace, not happily, but reluctantly.

Overview is here: https://youtu.be/obY1um6ehDM

Firefox 78 6 years ago

I really wanted to switch to Firefox, but after several weeks the thing that pushed me back was janky scrolling. It seems like a trivial thing, but it absolutely drove me first up the wall, and then back to Chrome.

Again, seeing the failure of the LHC and then deciding you're going to double down is just straight irresponsible.

Not to take away from your larger point, but describing the LHC as a failure may be wording it a little bit too strongly. The fact that it confirmed the Higgs Boson seems like a reasonably important experimental result.

A well-designed abstraction makes optimal usage fall out naturally. It would be very difficult to make the claim that optimal usage "falls out naturally" when one uses Ansible, and yet another layer of abstraction on top would more likely than not just increase the already staggering complexity in the system.