Hacker News: talaketu

New comment by talaketu in "“X” Didn’t Pay Severance. Now It’s Facing 2,200 Cases – and Big Fees"

talaketu — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 03:17:20 +0000

Note that Employees were not a party to the merger agreement. Does an acquisition FAQ bind the company? I believe the argument is that it was effectively an offer to employees to stick around, and employees who did so effectively accepted the offer, at the cost of other opportunities in the market, and hence this was a binding contract. This doesn't seem so solid to me.

New comment by talaketu in "The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”"

talaketu — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 01:29:18 +0000

If "in the park" is meant as an analogy for "on the platform" in content moderation, then curiously enough Twitter suspended @RealDonaldTrump for off-park action (Jan 6).

New comment by talaketu in "The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”"

talaketu — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 01:25:05 +0000

A wheelchair is used for transporting a person.

New comment by talaketu in "The rule says, “No vehicles in the park”"

talaketu — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 01:09:52 +0000

Let's say that in your opinion: (a) it's a vehicle, (b) it's in the park, (c) but the park authority doesn't have jurisdiction over the activity.

Is the correct resolution to deny (b)?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what "in the park" represents within the analogy.

New comment by talaketu in "Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun"

talaketu — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 12:43:15 +0000

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586686935518498816

> There seem to be 10 people "managing" for every one person coding

Take this literally, not as as a ration. - each SWE in a product team has an EM, Dir Eng, VP Eng, PM, Director Product, VP Product, ...

New comment by talaketu in "Why do arrays start at 0?"

talaketu — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 23:38:25 +0000

counting grid? What even are these?

New comment by talaketu in "Leslie Lamport revolutionized computer science with math [video]"

talaketu — Wed, 25 May 2022 01:03:35 +0000

Indeed - though I think this is a mathematical philosophy about theories. "Genius" is a nice word choice to emphasize your point - it refers to some kind of distinct spirit that happens to inspire the person, not the person themself. (A little like writing vs typing.)

New comment by talaketu in "Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out"

talaketu — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 02:31:20 +0000

Business data / process flow is so stable compared to a software implementation that having quality documentation pays dividends again and again. If you could document only one thing, document the business data flow.

New comment by talaketu in "US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent"

talaketu — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 22:52:57 +0000

Except when update schedule on the client differs from the server.

New comment by talaketu in "US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent"

talaketu — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 22:49:46 +0000

sure, except obviously sunrise at 6AM and sunset at 6PM.

New comment by talaketu in "Current hardware trends make C++ exceptions harder to justify"

talaketu — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 06:35:34 +0000

Yes, this is said, but the meaning of "prove" (which is related to "probe") has not really changed very much at all compared to "test" - a word which in this sense is a metonym from the fired pot used for assay of metal. The meaning in "mathematical proof" or "prove beyond reasonable doubt" or "prove your love" doesn't really diverge significantly from this so-called archaic meaning - a demonstration to show.

On the software abstraction, exceptions are simply a convenient implicit control flow device for handling the alternate path when an intended state cannot be achieved. I don't follow the paper's argument that "current exception design is suboptimal for efficient implementation" - but I would not be surprised considering the lifetime issues.

New comment by talaketu in "Current hardware trends make C++ exceptions harder to justify"

talaketu — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 01:01:10 +0000

The primary definition (OED) is "forming an exception", which is why I think this cliche is a tautology ("exceptions are for forming an exception") that does nothing to guide me on whether an exception is appropriate in a given case.

Btw, we don't say "exceptions are for infrequent conditions", because that's not what they're for.

I quite like the etymological "taken out", because it carries a notion of special handling - a control flow aspect that is the main point of using them.

New comment by talaketu in "Current hardware trends make C++ exceptions harder to justify"

talaketu — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 00:41:46 +0000

English also has the phrase "the exception proves the rule" - and it's just swell when our general code handles special cases.

I would have not have thought an unreachable host was exceptional, given that it's quite normal.

New comment by talaketu in "Current hardware trends make C++ exceptions harder to justify"

talaketu — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 21:03:12 +0000

"exceptions are exceptional" means what?

New comment by talaketu in "Why do we round corners?"

talaketu — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 03:46:28 +0000

"round corners feel natural" is no better explanation than "round corners are smoother".

New comment by talaketu in "Efficient Pagination Using Deferred Joins"

talaketu — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 03:15:27 +0000

> you'll see no benefit if you were paginating PKs in the first place, but most app developers are paginating actual records, right?

You are unclear on this point, but I don't really see how it addresses any of parent's (grogers) counterpoints. Maybe be a critical concept for you to reconsider! (I suspect application developers mainly use OFFSET/LIMIT because it's simple to implement and readily availability in SQL, rather than the optimal way for the user to accomplish their task.)

New comment by talaketu in "Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law"

talaketu — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 05:10:16 +0000

listen to the sentence Psaki utters at about 66s in: https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1448740969726156800

New comment by talaketu in "There is no 'printf'"

talaketu — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 22:17:36 +0000

oh right

> But what if you're not using C99 or newer?

UB - that takes all the fun out of it.

New comment by talaketu in "There is no 'printf'"

talaketu — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 20:50:17 +0000

> more efficient code that does the same thing

In this case, it produces a different result.

New comment by talaketu in "Platonism in the Philosophy of Mathematics (2018)"

talaketu — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 05:39:37 +0000

You are unsure whether "2 + 2 = 4" is real, but certain that "2 + 2 + 4 = 8" is.