Hacker News: cjfd

New comment by cjfd in "Dutch Train Map Simulator"

cjfd — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:02:32 +0000

As a patrician with only a desktop I was able to use this website.

New comment by cjfd in "How to Install Python3.14 from source on Ubuntu 26.04"

cjfd — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 08:55:19 +0000

Sure, it is quite easy to install python from source. Usually I am doing it because I need older version for work projects. Of course, the other thing that one needs in that kind of situations is virtual environments. This makes it also quite easy to ensure that you always run the correct python. Create a venv with a specific version of python and once you are in that venv, the 'python' command will automatically run that python version. That way it is easy to use an unlimited number of python version next to each other.

New comment by cjfd in "Programming Languages Are Authoring Tools for Platforms"

cjfd — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 09:55:47 +0000

Yes, this sound like it is true. But is it good? I mean, if I accept this idea, I start feeling more like a pet living in the house that is my platform then as a human who creates things. Also, it can be inefficient in that the same program or algorithm ends up being implemented in every language. Also, the article does mention that there is some pain in between programming language, e.g., when writing language bindings. I would push this point a bit further and note that we have too many tools and it is extremely painful to have to know all of them. Nowadays with AI it gets a bit more easy because it can help a lot with unfamiliar tools, but still that sounds like a problem that would not need to be solved if it was not created in the first place. Multiple programming languages tend to multiply the number of tools needed. I have been feeling for decades that C++ is a good language because it can be both low level and high level and can therefore take away the need for multiple programming languages. The world seems to be taking a different course, obviously, and in my opinion it makes people less free and less powerful than they otherwise could be.

New comment by cjfd in "Why Software Factories Fail (or: harness engineering is not enough)"

cjfd — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 07:50:09 +0000

Right. Because If I want feature A and it is available in configuration among features A through Z I will always perfectly pick the right letter of the alphabet and I will not at all be irritated by having 26 options that I have no idea about what is the difference between them.

New comment by cjfd in "Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux"

cjfd — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 07:08:10 +0000

I kept my old laptop (bought in 2007) alive for quite a while too. But last year I finally retired it. I also used archlinux 32 which worked fine for a while. But at some point the breakages really got too bad. I was using xfce4. For a while the xfce4-terminal was broken and would not start. That has the easy workaround of using xterm instead. But there were more breakages and it just started taking too much time. Quite a bit of software is ditching, or has ditched, 32-bit support.

New comment by cjfd in "AI changes the economics of software rewrites"

cjfd — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 07:54:26 +0000

Well, Joel is not saying not to refactor anything. In fact he is advocating improving the code quality in small steps. What is missing there is that in practice improving code quality in small steps requires automated tests . But I guess he can be forgiven given when he wrote the article.

New comment by cjfd in "Data centers trigger voter backlash"

cjfd — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 19:02:41 +0000

You can talk about UBI if you want to appear nice but people on UBI are also rather useless. Of course the real solution to the problem will be the change of carbon based life into silicon based life and the extermination of the former kind of life. Which is not the elected representatives problem if it happens to happen more than 4 years into the future.

New comment by cjfd in "Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction (2016)"

cjfd — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:43:24 +0000

100% agree. 'Code duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction' is a very good candidate for the worst programming article ever.

New comment by cjfd in "Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction (2016)"

cjfd — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:40:58 +0000

No. The duplication is seldomly that clean. It has started to diverge in subtle ways where the question becomes whether that was the intention or not. In the worst possible cases it has resulted in 8000-line functions full of duplication. 're-architecting the whole system to remove a bad abstraction' sounds fear mongering. That never happens.

New comment by cjfd in "[dead]"

cjfd — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 08:47:03 +0000

There are words. The word I am thinking of is 'parasite'. The billionaire class largely consists of parasites.

New comment by cjfd in "Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society"

cjfd — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:45:53 +0000

By the way, I am old enough to remember that world. When I was young, people had fat books with maps of most large and medium size places in the country.

New comment by cjfd in "Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society"

cjfd — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:43:04 +0000

I am not so sure. The world of printing out driving directions or emailing photos sounds a lot more calm. Also, simply quite enjoyable. The current world is cramming too many events in too little time, it seems. Stress is quite bad for health so I am not so sure about these hundreds of millions of lives saved. It may also have costed quite a few.

New comment by cjfd in "Software Architecture Guide (2019)"

cjfd — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 05:34:28 +0000

So what would be a good architecture? How would I recognize it if I stumbled against it?

My own inclinations here are that it would be good to have as few different technologies as possible. To run things on as few different machines as possible and to have automated tests for everything. The thing is that as soon as there are multiple technologies you get to have different people specializing in them and it is always the communications between those that becomes painful. The automated tests are there to prevent fear of change setting in. I think I am kind of advocating what is called a 'big ball of mud' but that I want it to be a transparent ball of mud because of automated testing. I guess what I am saying is that I distrust most developments in so-called application architecture of the last few decades except automated tests. In particular, I think frameworks and microservices are mostly just bad.

New comment by cjfd in "Coalton is an efficient, statically typed Lisp with ideas from Haskell and OCaml"

cjfd — Fri, 29 May 2026 11:00:31 +0000

I am not sure about the goose feather and the vellum but you do have a point about proving consistency. Fortunately, I also have a coq/rocq project for that kind of stuff so maybe one day I can be a not-so-very-weak programmer.

New comment by cjfd in "Coalton is an efficient, statically typed Lisp with ideas from Haskell and OCaml"

cjfd — Fri, 29 May 2026 07:18:19 +0000

pacman -S git vim gcc make gtest

That is about it. No stinkin' config files needed. Initial Makefile is about 15 lines long, I can type it myself or copy something from another project.

New comment by cjfd in "Coalton is an efficient, statically typed Lisp with ideas from Haskell and OCaml"

cjfd — Fri, 29 May 2026 05:38:24 +0000

How about not? If an LLM is needed to get set up either the language or the documentation is garbage. Probably both.

New comment by cjfd in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

cjfd — Sun, 24 May 2026 05:43:27 +0000

Well, the short summary of it all is that the US is the very curious case of a superpower attempting to become a third world country.

New comment by cjfd in "Idempotency Is Easy Until the Second Request Is Different"

cjfd — Sun, 10 May 2026 11:28:55 +0000

"assuming you have a real engineering job" does a lot of work there. You could also do a lot of work the other way by stating "assuming you are getting a real education". I studied physics when I was young and that field is a lot deeper than my current work in programming. Computer science can also be quite deep if one considers things like the halting problem, type theory and proof assistants.

New comment by cjfd in "Floats Don't Agree with Themselves"

cjfd — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:09:33 +0000

On the other hand, if you store a small integer in a float it is generally reliable to compare to it. E.g., setting a float to zero and comparing whether the float is zero.

New comment by cjfd in "The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code"

cjfd — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 08:42:19 +0000

This sounds all true to me, but I think there is more. It is not just decisions by management, it is also the wider economic context. Low interest rates and, for the US, having the world reserve currency as your own currency both seem to make many of these changes attractive or even inevitable. Low interest rates lead to 'innovation' which I put in scare quotes because besides real innovation it can also mean something that passes as innovation but in the end just turns out to be a bubble of stuff that was not valuable enough. The 'innovation' then crowds out investments in more boring sectors like manufacturing. This is also not good for the population in general because fewer jobs are left for people who are not suited for working in highly 'innovative' sectors.