Hacker News: preseinger

New comment by preseinger in "Val, a high-level systems programming language"

preseinger — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 23:37:01 +0000

my comment in no way takes the thread into a flame war, and i'm pretty frustrated that it's being judged that way

New comment by preseinger in "Nanosecond timestamp collisions are common"

preseinger — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 18:09:18 +0000

it's commonly totally sufficient for IDs to represent a rough sort order

millisecond precision is great for a lot of use cases

New comment by preseinger in "Val, a high-level systems programming language"

preseinger — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 12:36:20 +0000

the point isn't that issues and PRs exist, it's that the maintainers don't seem to know what they're doing

this is self-evident from a cursory review

link me any 3 non-trivial merged PRs and i'm happy to point out the problem i'm describing

New comment by preseinger in "Fly.io Postgres cluster down for 3 days, no word from them about it"

preseinger — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 09:54:16 +0000

and what does your experience tell you about applications which are not written in PHP, and which need to handle more than 1000 concurrent users?

New comment by preseinger in "Val, a high-level systems programming language"

preseinger — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 23:11:38 +0000

code generators are programs written in an existing programming language, which produce target language source code as output

macros are programs written in a separate, unique, often turing-complete meta-language, which is implemented entirely in the compile phase of the language which supports them

they're in no way equivalent

New comment by preseinger in "Val, a high-level systems programming language"

preseinger — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 19:25:59 +0000

usually, code generation is preferable to metaprogramming, mostly because it is easier to understand and maintain

New comment by preseinger in "Val, a high-level systems programming language"

preseinger — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 04:02:54 +0000

metaprogramming is not a virtue

programming languages do not themselves need to be programmable

New comment by preseinger in "Easy HTTPS for your private networks"

preseinger — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 16:57:25 +0000

and a government warrant bypasses all of that

there was this whole thing with edward snowden a few years ago, maybe you remember?

New comment by preseinger in "Easy HTTPS for your private networks"

preseinger — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 03:11:16 +0000

where does all of that hardware live?

unless it's in your home, it's not trustable

New comment by preseinger in "We replaced Firecracker with QEMU"

preseinger — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 16:44:16 +0000

bare metal has high capex and low opex

cloud vms have low capex and high opex

which one is more expensive is a function of many variables

New comment by preseinger in "Easy HTTPS for your private networks"

preseinger — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 16:40:26 +0000

how do you know your network is trusted and/or private?

trick question: you can't

even the network links between hosts in a single rack in a DC can be vulnerable

New comment by preseinger in "Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement"

preseinger — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 03:45:43 +0000

no, it isn't

it's an unsatisfiable requirement, and unnecessary to substantiate the legal claims

it's dumb to talk about

New comment by preseinger in "Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement"

preseinger — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 03:24:34 +0000

yes, really

feeding input to a program is pretty clearly categorically different than providing source material to a human being

New comment by preseinger in "Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement"

preseinger — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 03:20:27 +0000

how could someone "prove" which inputs and outputs of a large ML model leveraged any specific data?

New comment by preseinger in "Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)"

preseinger — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 18:27:50 +0000

i fully understand and appreciate the distinctions, and equivocations, you're describing here. i also agree with you that the best "stuff" acknowledges and maximizes both left- and right-brained parameters

my point is less about these abstract concepts, and more about the perspectives that human beings have when engaging with this "stuff"

concretely -- when i'm playing a musical instrument, my brain is in a mode that is completely different than, and totally incompatible with, the mode my brain is in when i'm writing a program, or working on a math problem

it's one or the other

why's book reads to me as a "playing an instrument" perspective on a "writing a program" problem, which doesn't work for me, at all -- personally!

other people, it works, i get that

New comment by preseinger in "Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)"

preseinger — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 18:14:58 +0000

i think my example of "balancing equations" was a poor one. obviously, there is almost never a single objective solution to a programming problem.

probably a better metaphor for programming is as a craft -- not a pure science, like math; not a pure art, like painting or writing; but much more akin to something like woodworking

New comment by preseinger in "Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)"

preseinger — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 18:07:23 +0000

yep! and i have almost exactly the opposite experience!

with ruby i feel (same caveats) like there is so much ambiguity that i can't build a coherent and predictable mental model of my program -- it makes me feel anxious and unsure

what you characterize as "cramped and constrained" i probably experience as "precise and unambiguous" -- it makes me feel calm and in control

no judgment from me about which of these perspectives is better or worse, i don't think there is any way to say that, just want to point out this interesting difference in perspective among practitioners

New comment by preseinger in "Backend of Meta Threads is built with Python 3.10"

preseinger — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 18:34:41 +0000

it's a spectrum, of course, but imo yes -- i don't want types to be opt-in at compile time, i want them to be mandatory

New comment by preseinger in "Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)"

preseinger — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 16:40:55 +0000

it's definitely possible to model programming as an art, and there is value in that model, but (imo) that model is neither productive nor accurate in most programming contexts

New comment by preseinger in "Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)"

preseinger — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 16:38:26 +0000

right! and, to build on that: people who see programming as maths understand it fundamentally differently than those who see it as prose, they approach every aspect of programming differently, evaluate "quality" on entirely different metrics, etc.

in my experience, this is a major source of friction in programming teams, and deserves to be addressed more directly -- if i had it my way, i'd prefer that those who see programming as prose would be disabused of this incorrect notion, but i understand that this is my bias speaking, and not any objective truth :)