<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: zogrodea</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=zogrodea</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 31 May 2026 01:09:42 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=zogrodea" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "Feeling the force of argument (2009) [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As programmers and as engineers, we often seek objective metrics to judge the value of things, neglecting aesthetic value and value that cannot easily be reduced to objective metrics.<p>This accessible paper reminds us that reasoning is not dispassionate and that we should attend to aesthetic matters as well.<p>The paper itself is in the context of education and seeks how to convey to students the importance and value of a subject matter.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2025 19:39:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45970985</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45970985</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45970985</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Feeling the force of argument (2009) [pdf]]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://uhra.herts.ac.uk/id/eprint/13085/1/903260.pdf">https://uhra.herts.ac.uk/id/eprint/13085/1/903260.pdf</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45970984">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45970984</a></p>
<p>Points: 2</p>
<p># Comments: 1</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2025 19:39:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://uhra.herts.ac.uk/id/eprint/13085/1/903260.pdf</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45970984</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45970984</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "C# almost has implicit interfaces"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's an interesting feature I didn't know F# had. It sounds similar to row polymorphism (which I found a good description of here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829766">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829766</a> ).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 26 Jul 2024 08:35:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41076880</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41076880</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41076880</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "Defense of Lisp macros: The automotive field as a case in point"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm just putting this Alan Kay question (from Stack Overflow) here because of relevance.<p>In that question, he's considered not with implementation or how good the execution of an idea is (which is certainly one type of progress), but in genuinely new ideas.<p>I don't think I personally am qualified to say yes or no. There are new data structures since then for example, but those tend to be improvements over existing ideas rather than "fundamental new ideas" which I understand him (perhaps wrongly) to be asking for.<p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-inventions-in-computing-since-1980" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-i...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 25 Jul 2024 19:11:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41072263</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41072263</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41072263</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "Show HN: OCaml-like pattern-matching with vanilla JavaScript (no transpiler)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That looks pretty great! I would love to use this at work if functional programming idioms were already familiar to the team and I didn't face resistance introducing them. Thank you for sharing and developing the library.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 24 Jul 2024 20:39:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41061790</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41061790</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41061790</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "Ruby methods are colorless"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think you're right. People describe Java as being colourless.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 24 Jul 2024 09:18:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41055110</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41055110</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41055110</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "Ruby methods are colorless"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My experience with this is in .NET, which has methods like readFile (which is async) and readFileSync.<p>.NET doesn't really need to provide two separate utility methods like this though, because you can use Task.wait to block until the async task is done.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 24 Jul 2024 08:13:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41054709</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41054709</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41054709</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "Ruby methods are colorless"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I had the same opinion with async/await, that it's nice to know a function performs IO and will wait before continuing. Makes it clearer when to use Promise.all to make multiple requests in parallel and wait for all of them to finish before continuing (faster than making calls sequentially).<p>I kind of wish the languages I use had Haskell's IO monad too, to separate functions in terms of the type system, but that's slightly different.<p>You might like this article (which is my personal favourite about function colouring). <a href="https://www.tedinski.com/2018/11/13/function-coloring.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.tedinski.com/2018/11/13/function-coloring.html</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 24 Jul 2024 08:01:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41054637</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41054637</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41054637</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "Microsoft says EU to blame for the worst IT outage"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Integrating Defender sounds like it would create an antitrust issue? If I remember correctly, MS was in the past taken to court and forced to sell some product or other separately, when they previously provided it for free.<p>No comment about being able to move Defender to not require kernel hooks (I don't know).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 23 Jul 2024 18:54:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41049505</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41049505</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41049505</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "Copying is the way design works (2020)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm not doubting, but can you give a few examples of Microsoft trouncing others?<p>I do recall Disney (a main reason copyright laws last so long, and who didn't want Steamboat Willie to enter public domain).<p>I also think of Amazon (which the creator of the Elm programming language describes as having "the Jeff problem" because they steal smaller people's/team's ideas), although that's a different problem.<p>I can't say anything comes to mind right now about MS, though, which is most likely a failure of my memory/knowledge. So I'd appreciate some examples.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 22 Jul 2024 22:24:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41040488</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41040488</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41040488</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "Copying is the way design works (2020)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Great article. Reminds me of this quote from RG Collingwood about how pervasive copying has been throughout history, and how the famous names we know to have copied would be baffled about us being shocked.<p>"Individualism would have it that the work of a genuine 
artist is altogether ‘original’, that is to say, purely his own work and not in any way that of other artists. The emotions expressed must be simply and solely his own, and so must his way of expressing them.<p>It is a shock to persons labouring under this prejudice when they find that Shakespeare’s plays, and notably Hamlet, that happy hunting-ground of self-expressionists, are merely adaptations of plays by other 
writers, scraps of Holinshed, Lives by Plutarch, or excerpts 
from the Gesta Romanorum; that Handel copied out into his 
own works whole movements by Arne; that the Scherzo of Beethoven’s C minor Symphony begins by reproducing 
the Finale of Mozart’s G minor, differently barred; or that Turner was in the habit of lifting his composition from the works of Claude Lorrain. Shakespeare or Handel or Beethoven or Turner would have thought it odd that anybody should be shocked."<p>I do understand the desire to protect one's work too and find it hard to take a single side.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 22 Jul 2024 22:12:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41040389</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41040389</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41040389</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "Automerge: A library of data structures for building collaborative applications"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I remember you describing Ropey's author as a "lovely human" too, and want to say that "it takes one to know one/real recognises real". :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 20 Jul 2024 13:47:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41016473</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41016473</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41016473</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "The unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgements"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This made me think of part of RG Collingwood's Autobiography, when he spoke of growing up while many around him were artists of one kind or another.<p>"During the same years I was constantly watching the work of my father and mother, and the other professional painters who frequented their house, and constantly trying to imitate them ; so that I learned to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting, so far as the attempt has gone.<p>I learned what some critics and aestheticians never know to the end of their lives, that no ‘work of art’ is ever finished, so that in that sense of the phrase there is no such thing as a ‘work of art’ at all. Work ceases upon the picture or manuscript, not because it is finished, but because sending-in day is at hand, or because the printer is clamorous for copy, or because ‘I am sick of working at this thing’ or ‘I can’t see what more I can do to it’."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 Jul 2024 12:07:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40994831</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40994831</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40994831</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "The unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgements"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm inclined to agree with your sentiment, but the example given doesn't quite sit right with me.<p>"Often a sentence fragment missing a verb (like this)."<p>vs<p>"Often a sentence fragment <i>is</i> missing a verb (like this)."<p>We still have short sentences which seem to make sense without a verb. Is the following grammatically incorrect? "Hello there!"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 Jul 2024 11:52:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40994734</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40994734</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40994734</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "Silicon Valley's tech titans line up to donate to Donald Trump"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks for enumerating; I never heard of any of that except for the pandemic (and I honestly don't know either way how much better/worse someone else would have done in that position).<p>I think this is the best comment for helping me understand the aversion to him. Most of it is about the economy which is easy to understand the impact of.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jul 2024 15:48:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40977626</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40977626</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40977626</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "Silicon Valley's tech titans line up to donate to Donald Trump"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I mentioned I never saw a difference in my daily life specifically, in response to a Trump presidency being called "dystopian". I was of course alive when Labour was in charge and have memories of that time, but people still went by their daily lives just the same from what I can tell.<p>The same goes for much on your list, except for increasing inequality which impacts people's standards of living. Some other comments produced better lists regarding the impact of his presidency (things I had not heard before and some which I wasn't think of like the pandemic - although I'mm not really sure either way how much better someone else would be in his place for that one).<p>(Brexit did shake things up when that happened - I was hearing about jobs being paused at the time and people being unable to work.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jul 2024 15:36:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40977531</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40977531</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40977531</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "Silicon Valley's tech titans line up to donate to Donald Trump"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's a legitimate point. The referendum was 8 years ago and I was 18 back then so there might be some myopia on my part.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jul 2024 14:53:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40977186</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40977186</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40977186</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "Silicon Valley's tech titans line up to donate to Donald Trump"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks for the reply. I suppose I have a hard time seeing much happening that will be too bad for ordinary citizens either way. I recall people panicking about a Trump presidency in 2016, but I never saw or heard many negative outcomes (for individuals) about his presidency so I don't quite understand it and have a hard time measuring how justified people's panic is.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jul 2024 14:49:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40977145</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40977145</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40977145</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "Silicon Valley's tech titans line up to donate to Donald Trump"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Would you mind explaining what the negative practical consequences would be in the event of a Trump nomination?<p>The worst thing I remember from him (an action which was truly horrible) was related to ICE separating children from their families.<p>In my country (the UK), I don't see a huge personal difference in my daily life when either one of the two mainstream parties is elected. So I'm interested in where your comment comes from.<p>I do have my own views of course, but neither seems significantly more dystopian to me than the other.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jul 2024 14:24:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40976923</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40976923</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40976923</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by zogrodea in "Solving the Worst Problem in Programming Education: Windows"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I remember my CS course using web tech (Codio) to teach coding, which doesn't seem like a bad option for educators, as far as dealing with cross-platform differences goes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Jul 2024 12:31:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40953705</link><dc:creator>zogrodea</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40953705</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40953705</guid></item></channel></rss>