Hacker News: erik_seaberg

New comment by erik_seaberg in "Translating 10M lines of Java to Kotlin"

erik_seaberg — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 22:12:46 +0000

It’s better to quote a reserved word than to be unable to use it.

New comment by erik_seaberg in "Translating 10M lines of Java to Kotlin"

erik_seaberg — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 02:26:11 +0000

Seems to me the article focused on how they did this big job, rather than why.

New comment by erik_seaberg in "Time for a code-yellow?: A blunt instrument that works"

erik_seaberg — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 10:09:11 +0000

There are times when mistakes will cause more serious problems for customers. There are times when staff will be less available to aid recovery. A good strategy shouldn't deny these truths.

New comment by erik_seaberg in "How we centralized and structured error handling in Golang"

erik_seaberg — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 04:37:14 +0000

Will the compiler infer that a lambda or a method ref implements Func with its exception type param, or do you have to rewrite call sites?

New comment by erik_seaberg in "Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?"

erik_seaberg — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 18:11:18 +0000

Software demand skyrocketed because of the WWW, which came out in 1991 just before Python (although Perl, slightly more mature, saw more use in the early days).

New comment by erik_seaberg in "People who refused to go back to the office and lost their jobs"

erik_seaberg — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 00:42:32 +0000

Deep work needs peace and quiet. This is getting hard to find in an open plan office, except late in the evening.

New comment by erik_seaberg in "Go Should Sometimes Be a No-Go"

erik_seaberg — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 21:19:48 +0000

This. It's so frustrating that sync.Map isn't generic and reusing the builtin map API is impossible.

New comment by erik_seaberg in "Go Should Sometimes Be a No-Go"

erik_seaberg — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 21:00:21 +0000

Boring repetition is a bad fit for the human brain. Working memory is very small. Mistakes per line are frequent. It wants to see patterns that are not quite there. Even when it works out, it's millions of times slower than having the computer fill in grunt work from a more concise and readable spec of the problem.

New comment by erik_seaberg in "Arctic tundra is now emitting more carbon than it absorbs, US agency says"

erik_seaberg — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 04:22:20 +0000

I remember science news articles about cooling rather than warming. Newsweek had to retract at least one of theirs: https://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-rewind-debunking-global-co...

New comment by erik_seaberg in "From where I left"

erik_seaberg — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 01:51:16 +0000

Around competitive prices and terms rather than a monopoly.

New comment by erik_seaberg in "Limbo: A complete rewrite of SQLite in Rust"

erik_seaberg — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 20:14:50 +0000

It might seem really unlikely any acquirer would ever sue, but if your big company has compliance auditors they will need to see something in black and white.

New comment by erik_seaberg in "Tsunami Warning for Northern California"

erik_seaberg — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 19:34:46 +0000

The warning went at least as far as the inland side of Fremont, which seemed extreme.

New comment by erik_seaberg in "You Might Be Better Off Without Pull Requests"

erik_seaberg — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 02:42:40 +0000

Pairing doesn't replace code review because the reviewer needs to see the finished branch with fresh eyes, unbiased by discussion and false starts, to know whether it's safe and clearly explained in writing for every oncall in the future.

(I also need peace and quiet to think.)

New comment by erik_seaberg in "You Might Be Better Off Without Pull Requests"

erik_seaberg — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 02:06:08 +0000

A "trusted team" pushing unreviewed code to prod is breathtakingly reckless. I don't trust anyone to do that. Not even myself. Please review my code, because our customers matter and so does oncall's peace and quiet.

On svn we reviewed finished feature branches and merged them to the next release branch every few days, though svn routinely crapped itself on spurious conflicts like renames. Git just enables this reliably.

New comment by erik_seaberg in "The story of Rogue"

erik_seaberg — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 00:51:33 +0000

I'm reminded of Bright's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(1977_video_game), a turn-based PvP strategy game. My friend's 1989-ish instance was sadistic enough to batch execute four turns per day. Every player had to rush to a TTY every six hours to give new marching orders. If you study or sleep too late, your forces and factories could be wiped out.

The obsessives, living on campus newly free of supervision, were line printing maps and writing logistic planning tools that foreshadowed EVE Online's "spreadsheets in space."

New comment by erik_seaberg in "Stop Requiring CRLF Line Endings"

erik_seaberg — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 22:07:41 +0000

Fixed pitch fonts and ASCII art are outdated; not even Dwarf Fortress relies on them anymore. You can sort of line up numbers, but you have to be careful to use U+2007 FIGURE SPACE (not U+0020 SPACE) and U+2212 MINUS (not U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS) to match the size of an Arabic digit. Code indentation only needs to be visibly bigger or smaller, and lining up words and formulae are jobs for TeX.

New comment by erik_seaberg in "Stop Requiring CRLF Line Endings"

erik_seaberg — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 21:36:28 +0000

This comes down to Postel's Law; they recommend liberally receiving what you conservatively cannot send. Also from RFC 2616 but not cited by the author:

> This flexibility regarding line breaks applies only to text media in the entity-body; a bare CR or LF MUST NOT be substituted for CRLF within any of the HTTP control structures (such as header fields and multipart boundaries).

They aren't going to allow sending LF until at least one bump to a higher protocol version where every server MUST accept it.

New comment by erik_seaberg in "Bury me on the moon, preferably on the far side"

erik_seaberg — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 00:31:09 +0000

The resources are 0.004% of the population of one wealthy country, who devoted themselves to shaping about 400 tons of stainless steel. Nothing constructive comes of starving a project that size, certainly not the global carbon sequestration I'd like to see.

New comment by erik_seaberg in "Bury me on the moon, preferably on the far side"

erik_seaberg — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 20:21:37 +0000

Escaping pollution is not a reason for going. Creating habitable areas on/under Mars is clearly harder than maintaining habitable areas on/under Earth. We have people who are much more motivated to do it and we might learn more from it, though.

New comment by erik_seaberg in "Universal Scripting Language–Run 466 Languages in One Interpreter"

erik_seaberg — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:31:47 +0000

Is there tooling to automatically transpile from other languages to this?