Hacker News: tomtheelder

New comment by tomtheelder in "Gleam v1.9"

tomtheelder — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 19:00:27 +0000

Gleam and Rust are really not alike at all aside from the most superficial ways. A couple bits of syntax, and the use of toml are about all I can come up with.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals"

tomtheelder — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 19:29:43 +0000

I'm an American and it definitely seems like we are in a significant and worsening loneliness crisis. I have no idea to what degree any of it is unique to Americans. Social connectedness, socialization rates, and companionship have all been declining for quite a while now. Lot's of potential causes and theories about it. [1] is a decent overview.

Like personally I'm doing great, and so are a lot of people I know, and I'm sure you as well. But I think a lot of Americans are struggling badly with their social lives.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9811250/

New comment by tomtheelder in "The Northeast is becoming fire country"

tomtheelder — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 21:21:15 +0000

The Northeast doesn't have a dry season, and I don't think anyone seriously thinks it's going to develop one. It just has occasional dry periods because precipitation is pretty chaotic, and is getting more chaotic due to climate change. When one of those happens there's some fire risk, like has just happened. "The Northeast is becoming fire country" is just unabashed scare mongering.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Wonder is acquiring Grubhub"

tomtheelder — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 19:49:40 +0000

Local grocery stores have basically been extinct for decades- and realistically that isn't that surprising given they mostly sell commodity products. We don't need to let restaurants suffer the same fate.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Monorepo – Our Experience"

tomtheelder — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 21:00:03 +0000

The dependency graph is no different for a monorepo vs a polyrepo. It's just a question of how those dependencies get resolved.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Monorepo – Our Experience"

tomtheelder — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 20:58:47 +0000

I mean it works for Google. Not saying that's a reason to go monorepo, but it at least suggests that it can work for a very large org with very diverse software.

I really don't see why anything you describe would be an issue at all for a monorepo.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid"

tomtheelder — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 20:48:40 +0000

I still have a cast iron skillet, but I mostly stopped using it once I got some carbon steel pans. In my experience they beat cast iron in nearly every way. I only use my cast iron now if I need a huge amount of thermal capacity (like pre-heating it to make pizza on or something) or for the presentation value.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Rust needs a web framework"

tomtheelder — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 12:13:13 +0000

I like OCaml a lot as a language, but the tooling is very, very poor by modern standards. Poor enough that I think it’s a total blocker on wider adoption.

New comment by tomtheelder in "YC criticized for backing AI startup that simply cloned another AI startup"

tomtheelder — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 13:23:29 +0000

For sure- it's just that YC didn't used to operate like that. They have morphed from an interesting higher-touch incubator whose involvement was a strong positive signal into a scattershot VC, but not everyone realizes that so being "YC backed" still carries more prestige than is warranted.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Notes on the Crystal Language"

tomtheelder — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 13:59:54 +0000

JVM is a hard dealbreaker for a scripting/glue language.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Legalizing Sports Gambling Was a Mistake"

tomtheelder — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 16:03:34 +0000

Of course, but I think it's worth seriously evaluating the subset of those activities that have an especially large propensity for harm.

New comment by tomtheelder in "The Slow, Painful Death of Agile and Jira"

tomtheelder — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 15:44:36 +0000

JIRA is a little overbuilt and overconfigurable, and I think that leads to it often being used in confusing ways. I don’t think it’s a bad product or anything, but my experiences on teams that use something simpler like Linear because the tool kind of guides you toward sane behaviors instead of letting you go nuts.

Kind of a convention over configuration thing.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Ask HN: How to roll out an internal UI component library"

tomtheelder — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 17:00:44 +0000

I mean starting a component library by building your own from the ground up is an absurd thing to even attempt.

IMO the only really sane approach is to start with a facade around an existing library. This way you get your single interface and your consistent visual style, but you are free to swap out implementations as necessary.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Why is it so hard to go back to the moon?"

tomtheelder — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 13:36:07 +0000

I personally can't really imagine anything less inspiring than repeating a feat we managed over 50 years ago.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Show HN: Ki Editor – Multicursor syntactical editor"

tomtheelder — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 01:39:50 +0000

Honestly I used to feel this way, but ended up using Helix for a few months mostly as an experiment. Now the selection-action version feels just as natural as action-selection used to. I’m sure I could flip it back if I wanted to.

I’m pretty sure it’s not a natural wiring of your brain, but rather long ingrained familiarity.

That said, incredibly marginal value to switching so I wouldn’t bother.

New comment by tomtheelder in "What I gave up to become an engineering manager"

tomtheelder — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 13:10:52 +0000

My biggest tip would just be to make it abundantly clear in your interview that this is a goal of yours. Some jobs will bounce you for that, but that’s good- you want to filter those out. Others will see it as a positive and you’ll come in with your manager and leadership already understanding the direction you want to grow in.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Microsoft donates the Mono Project to the Wine team"

tomtheelder — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 00:55:23 +0000

Honestly this is such an interesting question. Conventional wisdom would definitely say C#, but I’ve always wondered if that’s because imperative programming is easier than functional for a beginner, or because basically everyone starts with imperative. I’d be curious to see what would happen if someone started functional first.

All that said, probably C#.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Blood pressure control should focus on more potassium (2023)"

tomtheelder — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 00:46:15 +0000

Exercise is a fantastic idea, and the cardioprotective benefits are doubly important for those of us with hypertension, but it’s probably not going to lower your BP by more than a few points.

New comment by tomtheelder in "Please do not attempt to simplify this code"

tomtheelder — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 23:50:50 +0000

True, but I would have to categorize that as an unacceptable workaround haha

New comment by tomtheelder in "Please do not attempt to simplify this code"

tomtheelder — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 23:41:55 +0000

It’s actually so painful to go back to languages without destructuring and pattern matching.