Hacker News: devmunchies

New comment by devmunchies in "The blissful Zen of a good side project"

devmunchies — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 23:48:32 +0000

Related to the "blissful" feeling, an under emphasized criteria when choosing current tasks for engineers from a backlog of tasks is which feature are they more excited to work on right now.

The motiviation and tinkering can be similar to a side project, and results in higher quality work IMO. Obviously there are urgent tasks, but it's an ignored vector in the "weighting system" for choosing work for engineers.

If you wait to assign the task in the next sprint, the excitement for that particular task might be gone.

New comment by devmunchies in "Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone"

devmunchies — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 19:20:13 +0000

This is the first thread ive commented on since trump was inaugurated and it’s sad to see HN has turned into Reddit.

emotionally charged, bad faith assumptions at the smallest whiff of independent thought.

New comment by devmunchies in "Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone"

devmunchies — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 04:16:22 +0000

But the memories will live on in our hearts.

New comment by devmunchies in "Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone"

devmunchies — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 03:05:15 +0000

I didn’t say I was in favor of axing all govt positions and grants, dude.

New comment by devmunchies in "Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone"

devmunchies — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 03:03:44 +0000

The regulators ain’t regulating. That’s their main job, not innovation.

New comment by devmunchies in "Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone"

devmunchies — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 02:49:58 +0000

The federal govt can’t be the majority of technological innovation. If we’re lucky this vacuum will be filled by an even larger private sector innovation hub like Xerox park and bell labs.

New comment by devmunchies in "JPMorgan Workers Ponder Union in Wake of Return-to-Office Mandate"

devmunchies — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 21:02:24 +0000

> I imagine the entire point of RTO mandates is to keep cities sustainable.

The main important factor IMO is mentorship of junior talent. (I'm speaking for technical orgs)

Viewing the organization as a living organism where an employee is a "cell", then there are material benefits in the "cellular replication" of talent and rejuvenation of the next generation.

It can definitely be true that RTO is worse for an individual engineer but better for the health of the organization long-term. Both can be true.

In my experience, remote only companies tend to prefer a higher ratio of senior employees for this reason. It's plug-an-play.

New comment by devmunchies in "China is the sole manufacturing superpower"

devmunchies — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 06:44:41 +0000

I think it's less capability and more the cost of goods. You can't compete with items that are half the cost to produce in east asia.

Manufacturing was always going to move to where it costs less.

It's bad for a productive american economy but it's a prisoner's dilemma so you can't blame businesses or consumers.

The government is the only party that had the power to do anything. it's 100% an economics problem.

New comment by devmunchies in "8 months of OCaml after 8 years of Haskell in production (2023)"

devmunchies — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 04:32:02 +0000

I didn't use it 10 years ago but I've been using it for the last 4 years on mac and linux exclusively.

Microsoft seems to be prioritizing "cloud" on all their developer products (rather than just windows). I don't feel disadvantaged by NOT using dotnet on windows.

New comment by devmunchies in "8 months of OCaml after 8 years of Haskell in production (2023)"

devmunchies — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 04:25:21 +0000

> string_of_int, int_of_string

That didn't bother me so much because i speak spanish and can read french. OCaml is of french origin. `string_of_int` is a bad english translation—should have been `string_from_int`.

I like F# where I can use the `int` or `string` functions:

    let myString = "2024"
    let myInt = int myString
    let myStringAgain = string myInt

New comment by devmunchies in "I Don't Have Spotify"

devmunchies — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 19:42:54 +0000

What do i even pay Vercel for?! gah

New comment by devmunchies in "I Don't Have Spotify"

devmunchies — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 04:49:48 +0000

Wait, all the music I bought on bandcamp can disappear if the artist removes it from their public inventory?

New comment by devmunchies in "I Don't Have Spotify"

devmunchies — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 04:47:59 +0000

I recently learned about buying Mp3s on Amazon. Most CD purchase pages have a "purchase options" and you can do Mp3s. I do that for mainstream things for my kids that aren't on bandcamp (such as music from a kids TV show).

I'm actually working on a IoT device where one of the main goals was selfhosting audio content for my kids. Uses AI for the user interface. Similar to Alexa but battery powered. Still in private beta (orders are closed right now) but here is the link for anyone curious. https://heycurio.com/

New comment by devmunchies in "Gleam Is Pragmatic"

devmunchies — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 05:40:43 +0000

ML (which is the precursor to OCaml/f#), pascal, basic, and sql use <>. If you consider that <, <=, etc are used as comparison operators it makes sense for <> to be in that camp. I actually never thought of it that way.

Interesting table here highlighting old programming languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_operator#Standard_r...

New comment by devmunchies in "Gleam Is Pragmatic"

devmunchies — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 05:21:26 +0000

I just assumed it was an erlang thing since elixir and gleam both do it. Now it seems even more odd that erlang doesn’t do it but they both chose it.

New comment by devmunchies in "Gleam Is Pragmatic"

devmunchies — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 22:15:01 +0000

One thing I dislike with erlang based languages (both gleam and elixir) is that they use “<>” for string concatenation.

In F#, “<>” is the equivalent of “!=“. Postgres also uses <> for inequality so my queries and f# code have that consistency.

New comment by devmunchies in "Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech"

devmunchies — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 06:20:13 +0000

My main criticism of this article and the article it references is that it refers to Marc Andreessen as a “not-so-bright billionaire” who “doesn’t build shit”. Do people forgot that he built the first popular web browser (mosaic) and then built Netscape? He is much more part of “hacker” culture than other names mentioned.

New comment by devmunchies in "Why Haskell?"

devmunchies — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 19:31:48 +0000

I’ve been using f# in production for 4+ years and haven’t used windows in like 15 years.

Speaking of LSP, the lsp standard is developed by Microsoft so naturally any dotnet language will have good lsp support.

New comment by devmunchies in "Why Haskell?"

devmunchies — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 19:22:58 +0000

A lot of major C# features were first implemented in F#. I think of it as a place for Microsoft engineers/researchers to be more experimental with novel features that still need to target the CLR (the dotnet VM). Sometimes even requiring changes to the CLR itself. In that lens, it has had a very large indirect financial impact on the dotnet ecosystem.

New comment by devmunchies in "Functional languages should be so much better at mutation than they are"

devmunchies — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 20:29:03 +0000

I use f# daily at my company and am actually glad that many dotnet api integrations use array buffers (e.g. a byte array for streaming)

this forces me to optimize the f# code by thinking in terms of low-memory, mutable data structures when interfacing with external libraries.