To be honest I'm not actually sure how different the API is. I've never used it. I just frequently trip over the existence of parallel APIs for directory buckets (when I'm doing something niche, mostly; I think GetObject/PutObject are the same.)

--https://github.com/microsoft/typescript-go/discussions/411

I haven't looked at the tsc codebase. I do currently use Golang at my job and have used TypeScript at a previous job several years ago.

I'm surprised to hear that idiomatic Golang resembles the existing coding patterns of the tsc codebase. I've never felt that idiomatic code in Golang resembled idiomatic code in TypeScript. Notably, sum types are commonly called out as something especially useful in writing compilers, and when I've wanted them in Golang I've struggled to replace them.

Is there something special about the existing tsc codebase, or does the statement about idiomatic Golang resembling the existing codebase something you could say about most TypeScript codebases?

> As he points out: it would be terrible! We’d lose the intuitive understanding of how to use the gears to solve any situation we encounter. Which mode do you use for gravel + downhill?

I have no idea, actually, what gears I should use for gravel + downhill, which is surprising since about 6 years ago I biked from Pittsburgh to DC, which had a fairly long downhill section. I remember mostly coasting on that section. I might've stopped a few times to make sure my brakes could cool down. I don't think there is a wrong gear on a bicycle when coasting down on gravel?

Perhaps I am the user who does need a nightmare bicycle with a gravel + downhill button.

It's not clear to me what was exploitable when.

It's a loan in name only.

Regarding Bezos's selling of stocks - perhaps he has offsetting capital gains. See https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyBorrowDieExplained/comments/1f26...

In this imaginary design, the syscalls you make would look something like:

- BeginChannelTx -> return ChannelTxID

- ReadZFSProperties(ChannelTxID, params) -> return data

- DestroySomeDatasets(ChannelTxID, params) -> ok

- CommitChannelTx(ChannelTxID)

Notably, DestroySomeDatasets doesn't actually do any work. It merely records which datasets you want to destroy. There are no callbacks as far as I can see: there's no kernel thread waiting on a user thread to do something. This way also lets you express branching.

The drawback of this approach is you need a lock on all mutating administrative commands when you call BeginChannelTX. I talked to a ZFS dev, and he said that with ZFS' design, that's actually the txg sync lock. This means that while reads will proceed, writes will only proceed for a short period of time, and nothing will make it to disk. The overhead of making all these syscalls was also judged to be problematic.

In this theoretical design, you could just block all other administrative modifications. I don't think you need to tie up an entire CPU core, and I'm fairly sure that these zfs operations don't block regular reads and writes.

I think you had it right in your initial comment. There's no good way express branching with an implementation which incrementally submits operations to be committed as a batch. You'd have to take an admin lock on an entire zpool.

EDIT: talked to a zfs dev, said this would take the txg sync lock.

Needing to use arrays for the IN use case (see https://github.com/kyleconroy/sqlc/issues/216) and the bulk insert case feel like large divergences from what "idiomatic SQL" looks like. It means that you have to adjust how you write your queries. And that can be intimidating for new developers.

The conditional insert case also just doesn't look particularly elegant and the SQL query is pretty large.

sqlc also just doesn't look like it could help with very dynamic queries I need to generate - I work on a team that owns a little domain-specific search engine. The conditional approach could in theory with here, but it's not good for the query planner: https://use-the-index-luke.com/sql/where-clause/obfuscation/...

A translation of the original article [1] that introduced the concept notes in a footnote that "the definitions given below are also meaningful if the code is taken to mean an arbitrary set of words (possibly of different lengths) in some alphabet containing r letters (r >= 2)".

And if you wish to strictly stick to how it was originally defined, you'd need to only use strings of the same length.

More recent sources [2] say instead "over some alphabet", and even in the first footnote, describe results for "arbitrarily large alphabets"!

[1] https://nymity.ch/sybilhunting/pdf/Levenshtein1966a.pdf

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1005.4033.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19824721

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

There are two orthogonal problems here: a lack of package isolation and nondeterminism.

Nix isolates packages, such that updating one package has no impact on any other packages (with unavoidable exceptions like the graphics driver, presumably).

You're right that package isolation isn't much of a problem on non-rolling distros. One of the benefits of Nix is that you get some of the stability and predictability of an LTS distro with the freshness of a rolling distro when desired, without having to deal with package conflicts.

Incidentally, Nix doesn't need to be used in a deterministic manner. In fact, I don't think most desktop users of Nix care too much about determinism for most packages they run. I certainly don't; I'm happy to follow along with whatever arrives in my channel. Nix has features that support determinism, and I'm certainly glad they exist for when I end up needing them, but they're not necessarily why people use Nix.

> Obviously, stateless is valuable.

When I said "stateless", I was referring to the whole "cattle, not pets" view of servers, where the running state of any particular server is unimportant, with nothing in the filesystem being of value. I was arguing that needing to build a new image and reboot in order to change which packages are installed are a poor fit for the desktop use case, where frequent reboots are much more inconvenient than for the server use case.

I'm not sure what taohansen meant when they used the word "stateless"; they seem to mean something different when they say that.

Anyways, this point is not really applicable anymore, since you've stated:

> You can install your packages and use them when you like, without requiring a rebuild.

Presumably if you install additional packages uncontrolled by your tooling, then your systems can start to drift away from each other.

Nix does not have this compromise; there's no build step. At any given point in time you can reproduce whatever configuration you have on one machine on another machine, regardless of how piecemeal you arrived at that configuration.

I'd imagine this solution inherits any problems that pacman has. The Arch wiki states that "if two packages depend on the same library, upgrading only one package might also upgrade the library (as a dependency), which might then break the other package which depends on an older version of the library." (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/System_maintenance) This is one of the problems Nix does not have by design; in fact Nix lets you mix and match packages painlessly.

This also doesn't seem to allow unprivileged users to install packages, which is kind of a side benefit of using Nix.

Docker-esque solutions' issues with reproducibility are well known; I look at https://godarch.com/concepts/images/, particularly how packages are installed:

  #!/usr/bin/env bash
  pacman -S steam --noconfirm

Also, frankly, I don't want to run my personal computer like a server, with complete immutability and the need to build fat image files every time I want to try out an additional program. That seems to me like a workflow that's better suited for servers where spending a few minutes for a deploy isn't a blocking operation, and where stateless service design is considered best practice.