Hacker News: rjrodger

New comment by rjrodger in "A new experimental Go API for JSON"

rjrodger — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 18:24:01 +0000

null != nil !!!

It is good to see some partial solutions to this issue. It plagues most languages and introduces a nice little ambiguity that is just trouble waiting to happen.

Ironically, JavaScript with its hilarious `null` and `undefined` does not have this problem.

Most JSON parsers and emitters in most languages should use a special value for "JSON null".

New comment by rjrodger in "Gettiers in software engineering (2019)"

rjrodger — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 12:44:48 +0000

Good to have a name for this!

My favourite debugging technique is "introduce a known error".

This validates that your set of "facts" about the file you think you're editing are actually facts about the actual file you are editing.

For example: is the damn thing even compiling?

Elephant in the room: The myth of exponential hypergrowth

rjrodger — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 12:14:33 +0000

Article URL: https://longform.asmartbear.com/exponential-growth/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729967

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by rjrodger in "Pg_vectorize: Vector search and RAG on Postgres"

rjrodger — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 12:59:19 +0000

Any chance you'd Open Source it?

New comment by rjrodger in "Ask HN: Good books on philosophy of engineering?"

rjrodger — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 22:08:57 +0000

You did say philosophy of engineering, right?

Look no further than “The Specialist” by Charles Sale

“YOU'VE heard a lot of pratin' and prattlin' about this bein' the age of specialization. I'm a carpenter by trade. At one time I could of built a house, barn, church, or chicken coop. But I seen the need of a specialist in my line, so I studied her. I got her, she's mine. Gentlemen, you are face to face with the champion privybuilder of Sangamon County.”

Sometimes the best books are also the shortest.

https://www.toiletrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Spec...

New comment by rjrodger in "A coder considers the waning days of the craft"

rjrodger — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 11:59:24 +0000

To me this looks like a Jevons Paradox situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox [1]

Increased developer productivity will lead to a lot more software development, at all levels, rather than less.

1. "In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced."

New comment by rjrodger in "Amazon Prime Video’s Microservices Move Doesn’t Lead to a Monolith After All"

rjrodger — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 13:57:41 +0000

Well each of our microservices is also a Node package, so we also do that ourselves for the Lambda deployments - load 'em all up in the one Lamdba!

New comment by rjrodger in "Using Bun.js as a Bundler"

rjrodger — Thu, 18 May 2023 08:38:22 +0000

fs.watch is definitely a high priority in order to support day-to-day dev as a build system.

(Hey Jarred - Let’s get that zig package thing done soon!)

New comment by rjrodger in "Asymptote: 2D and 3D TeX-Aware Vector Graphics Language"

rjrodger — Fri, 12 May 2023 17:26:07 +0000

This is pretty fun - used it to generate diagrams for my book!

New comment by rjrodger in "Why Python keeps growing, explained"

rjrodger — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 14:17:30 +0000

Not really safe to assume there's a decent one. Better to install directly from https://nodejs.org/

New comment by rjrodger in "Startup Decoupling and Reckoning"

rjrodger — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 13:24:52 +0000

I will hire the founders of a failed startup any day of the week over just about any other category of candidate. They are "salted" horses of the finest calibre.

In my last shop, we had 8 (I think) former CEOs on staff. All made very significant impacts to the business.

If you are staring into the Valley of Death, remember that it is a valley, and you do come out the other side, and that makes you rare and valuable.

New comment by rjrodger in "The Art of Money Getting or Golden Rules for Making Money by P. T. Barnum (1880)"

rjrodger — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 10:34:20 +0000

Salty, but a true classic. Having read easily several hundred "business" books, this one is my desert island book.

New comment by rjrodger in "The James Webb Space Telescope is finding too many early galaxies"

rjrodger — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 21:09:40 +0000

Visible light was scattering off densely packed electrons up to about 300k years after the Big Bang - so I guess - white.

New comment by rjrodger in "Real World Micro Services"

rjrodger — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 10:54:37 +0000

Microservices are about reusability - at the "business logic" level. This framework and its services gets that exactly right. All the network stuff is fine and dandy but first you need to build actual features, which is where intentionally reusable microservices like these really shine.

New comment by rjrodger in "Ask HN: Anyone joined a company after contributing to their OSS projects?"

rjrodger — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 08:51:46 +0000

Speaking from the company side, this is our main method of hiring! It works great.

A key factor would be that we as a company support and maintain an open source framework. I'm not sure how well it would work without that.

New comment by rjrodger in "An underrated idea: the priority view"

rjrodger — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 12:28:19 +0000

Is this not equivalent to medical triage? Those who will die anyway, and those who will live anyway, get no immediate treatment (apart from morphine). Those who will not survive without treatment, get the resources.

Thus: move to the city, as the gifted child will most likely do just fine in life. Have dinner with the depressed friend, because the happy friend will enjoy the concert anyway.

Seems perfectly consistent with even simplistic utilitarianism.

New comment by rjrodger in "Making Emacs Popular Again (2020)"

rjrodger — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 12:03:38 +0000

That's it. That's the reason. You can usually get Emacs key bindings (or a shallow approximation thereof) in most editors. But yeah, we're stuck, so I guess we just gotta double down.

It is fun when the young 'uns do a double take after you execute a particularly fancy macro. I do love that.

New comment by rjrodger in "How narcissists climb the career ladder quickly"

rjrodger — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 14:44:45 +0000

You'll be wanting https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... - The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office” - the ultimate meta discussion of office politics.

New comment by rjrodger in "Cue, an open-source data validation language"

rjrodger — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 10:20:49 +0000

Try cuelang.org/play - it's exactly that. Seems to be just a demo though.

New comment by rjrodger in "Cue, an open-source data validation language"

rjrodger — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 10:18:45 +0000

Our implementation is in TS. However that's just an API. Do you have some ideas on how you'd like the TS type system to work with the Cue type system. It's an open question for us.