Hacker News: RobertKerans

New comment by RobertKerans in "Typography is impossible (2016)"

RobertKerans — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 09:22:07 +0000

"Ruby" is the name of the size of the type

New comment by RobertKerans in "Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again"

RobertKerans — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 13:31:15 +0000

Apropos of nothing, but a few Christmasses ago the place I worked had a dedicated fibre line that some workmen doing gas line repairs sawed straight through, took out everything; I was just drone worker at the time & it was a beautiful thing

New comment by RobertKerans in "Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again"

RobertKerans — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 12:49:10 +0000

afaik there's nothing tying it specifically to GH (where the metatada is), and then the actual code is just in an S3 bucket, so in theory should be reasonably easy [ha!] to just host anywhere. In theory, I mean that's a massive lump of stuff, and surely wherever it gets hosted is going to face exactly the same issues (though if it does become very widely used, then you'd think every major provider that controls infra could easily have a mirror)

New comment by RobertKerans in "Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again"

RobertKerans — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 12:43:34 +0000

Ah, back to normal now. Getting intermittent flickers on some of our apps but all seems solid-ish again

New comment by RobertKerans in "Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again"

RobertKerans — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 12:36:47 +0000

Yep, S3 possibly the villain here

New comment by RobertKerans in "Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again"

RobertKerans — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 12:33:36 +0000

Assuming crates.io is AWS-backed? Getting fun situation where direct dependencies of an application are downloading but then the sub-dependencies aren't.

New comment by RobertKerans in "Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)"

RobertKerans — Wed, 20 Oct 2021 08:20:22 +0000

It's more analogous to an alternative history where the Ruby framework most people used was Rack [directly], not anything built on top of it (ie Rails).

New comment by RobertKerans in "Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations"

RobertKerans — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 12:25:33 +0000

Yes, that seems to be true (and is that % you've guessed maybe too low? Maybe far too low?). Even with that though, it's extraordinarily fine margins -- w/r/t the businesses that I mentioned, the majority of the income comes from those value-adds, if they weren't there it would generally be difficult for the businesses to survive financially. That's where I was coming from.

To me, Spotify seems to be using podcasts in a similar way. I assume it's because the central business model is unsustainable when combined with investor pressure; they can't just focus on core product because they're burning too much of other people's money in an attempt to outcompete everyone else

New comment by RobertKerans in "Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations"

RobertKerans — Sun, 17 Oct 2021 08:25:16 +0000

Well...yes, not necessarily fundamental, but it's the same class of problem cinemas and restaurants have (to pick two). What do cinemas mainly make money from? What do restaurants mainly make money from?

New comment by RobertKerans in "Carp – A statically typed Lisp, without a GC, for real-time applications"

RobertKerans — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 17:42:59 +0000

& Rust is surely a highly imperative language that has absorbed functional idioms (where appropriate), rather than something that falls under the banner of "functional language"?

New comment by RobertKerans in "Esbuild – An extremely fast JavaScript bundler"

RobertKerans — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 10:51:04 +0000

You're likely literally doing the same thing with Webpack. There is only one complete implementation of the TS compiler in existence, so you have to use that to typecheck, it doesn't matter what bundler tool is used. If you need the type definitions as part of the output (eg you are distributing a library), then you have to involve the compiler to construct the output definition files, but for the code itself, it doesn't really matter because you're just generating JS. The TS compiler is very slow (and in any case is not designed to produce code bundles - it just dumbly translates all the TS to JS), so the standard way to speed this up is to use a module bundling tool that ignores the types and compiles the code as JS, and have the TS compiler set to not emit any files itself.

Nothing in the above precludes using the compiler to typecheck the code, that's the primary usecase & what sibling is saying about thinking of it as a linter: if typechecking fails, don't build

New comment by RobertKerans in "Esbuild – An extremely fast JavaScript bundler"

RobertKerans — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 10:41:18 +0000

It's not the same thing though, SWC is a different category of tool.

Edit: though I guess if you include the sibling project swcpack, it covers the same ground. SWC itself doesn't though.

New comment by RobertKerans in "Advice to New Managers: Don't Joke About Firing People (2020)"

RobertKerans — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 17:59:18 +0000

Aye very similar at my last job -- got asked a month before that if I was happy, then got given a task with a slightly weird vibe about it that noone except the CTO (also my direct manager and the HR, was small company...) seemed to know I was doing. Same amount of time for me as well, 9 months. My output wasn't great either (I'd made an error taking the job, ignoring a series of red flags the CTO was waving in front of me in favour of getting experience with a specific tech stack, which was stupid, and I p much hated my life by that point). Place had done random firings before though (designer and a business support were in one day, gone the next), so not surprised, but hey ho.

New comment by RobertKerans in "Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater"

RobertKerans — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 19:47:42 +0000

Ah, sorry, I misread that. GP has fair points though, whole situation in the UK is crazy, infects everything, it's an arms race

New comment by RobertKerans in "Deno 1.14"

RobertKerans — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 19:39:43 +0000

Two (import + require, which, as import didn't exist, was necessary). Most current tooling is built to handle both (Deno draws a line under it by disallowing the older one)

New comment by RobertKerans in "Deno 1.14"

RobertKerans — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 19:34:42 +0000

Practically, number of browsers + 2 (Node and Deno, and Deno is stretching the definition of practical at this early stage).

Edit: + Electron + the JS runtime used for Windows ecosystem based on Chakra (not sure if that's still alive though?) + a few other similar ones in that vein for desktop or mobile OS'.

+ whatever is available for embedded & similar devices, (I guess there will be a few but I know little about that area).

+ various [highly] specialised business/academic/hobby/PoC/etc runtimes, but they're not realistically things that many people care about.

New comment by RobertKerans in "Lumber crash leads to 'blowout' sales as prices crater"

RobertKerans — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 12:11:36 +0000

> Being valued at £2M doesn't mean you could sell all of them for that price or that the people living in them paid £2M for them

But in London these houses do sell, normally very quickly (and bullshit apartments in shiny new blocks that are in same price bracket I guess same, generally they do seem to sell, but I assume that's just parking money for tax purposes so not quite same thing).

New comment by RobertKerans in "Unity patents ECS"

RobertKerans — Thu, 09 Sep 2021 10:14:41 +0000

Caveat that this is second hand info based entirely on GameFromScratch (I've avoided playing with it because of his updates) -- he's recorded a new review on afaics every recent Lumberyard release, and currently seems answer is "yes, ish, the actual engine seems reasonable, but the process of actually getting that engine up and running is staggeringly bad, albeit 100× better than it was six months ago"

New comment by RobertKerans in "Htmlq: like jq, but for html"

RobertKerans — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 15:55:49 +0000

Of course it is, but neither parent nor anyone else is saying anything close to the mistake being effective documentation. There's a single missing word which needs to be added in, but the overall text is clearly writing to a target audience. You are aware of this, and of how small the mistake is, and you understand what the sentence should read as, so I'm not sure what your point is?

New comment by RobertKerans in "Writing Well-Documented Code – Learn from Examples"

RobertKerans — Sun, 05 Sep 2021 12:42:50 +0000

Yeah, I think there's a fundamental problem with the implementation -- with small, single-file programs where the code can be written in a chronologically linear manner it works well. But with that there's no need for reordering logic, so much of the more complex parts of weaving are redundant. Scripts, for example, are pretty easy to set up as [for example] markdown files, which works great (particularly in a project that requires a set of helper scripts which need why communicated -- having a set of markdown files in a folder makes it IME much more ergonomic for other devs). Anything larger and it gets increasingly fiddly and (again IME) not worth it.