4 ms·

Hacker news participation can also indicate compilation, as it does for me right now.

by alexgartrell 15y ago

PaulHoule 15y ago
Compilation is a form of boredom ;-)
- wpietri 15y ago
  No shit. I would much rather spend $10k in hardware than have a developer bored while waiting for something to finish. Part of the problem, though, is tools. A lot of things are built for resource use minimization. That made sense 20 years ago, but now I have 8 GB of RAM and 4 fast cores on my desktop, and most of that capacity just sits idle. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm typing and the compiler isn't already running then it's missing an opportunity.
- Lewisham 15y ago
  I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but this is entirely true. I'm sat here watching a data mining job. It's wasted time, largely brought on because the job doesn't have unit tests, so I have no confidence it'll actually complete correctly, so I need to watch the log and see what its doing. This not a good use of my time, and I hate seeing that console, and I feel bad for being on HN when I could be productive.
  - paulbaumgart 15y ago
    ./data_mining_job && growlnotify -m "Success!" || growlnotify -m "Failure :-(" (season with while, read and grep to taste)
    - Lewisham 15y ago
      Hah, if only it was so simple! The integrity of the job is the problem. It's been coded to failover problems (as the original data integrity its mining from isn't good), so it will happily do something stupid for hours. That's why I have to watch it, and make sure its not doing something stupid. Unit tests would ensure stupidity was not a possibility, and regressions could be tracked. Too late for that, unfortunately. So I watch.
      - rcfox 15y ago
        Couldn't you write unit tests while you wait?
        Lewisham 15y ago
        Fair point :)
    - paulbaumgart 15y ago
      Whoops. Too late to edit, but a correction: growlnotify -m "Success! " (the space tells bash to treat the exclamation point as text)
      - rcfox 15y ago
        Or just use \!
        deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
        paulbaumgart 15y ago
        Good call. Though for multi-word messages, you'd have to do something like: growlnotify -m "$(echo Great\! Success\!)"
        qntm 15y ago
        For arbitrary messages: sub escape { my $arg = shift; $arg =~ s/([^a-zA-Z0-9_])/\\$1/g; return $arg; }
bartl 15y ago
http://xkcd.com/303/ http://xkcd.com/303/ ?
keeran 15y ago
Or a long-running test/spec suite :)
lars512 15y ago
That's one of the legitimate reasons to switch to an interpreted language, or else Go. Unless you value your compilation off-time :)

Hacker news participation can also indicate compilation, as it does for me right now.

PaulHoule 15y ago

Compilation is a form of boredom ;-)

wpietri 15y ago
No shit. I would much rather spend $10k in hardware than have a developer bored while waiting for something to finish. Part of the problem, though, is tools. A lot of things are built for resource use minimization. That made sense 20 years ago, but now I have 8 GB of RAM and 4 fast cores on my desktop, and most of that capacity just sits idle. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm typing and the compiler isn't already running then it's missing an opportunity.
Lewisham 15y ago
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but this is entirely true. I'm sat here watching a data mining job. It's wasted time, largely brought on because the job doesn't have unit tests, so I have no confidence it'll actually complete correctly, so I need to watch the log and see what its doing. This not a good use of my time, and I hate seeing that console, and I feel bad for being on HN when I could be productive.
- paulbaumgart 15y ago
  ./data_mining_job && growlnotify -m "Success!" || growlnotify -m "Failure :-(" (season with while, read and grep to taste)
  - Lewisham 15y ago
    Hah, if only it was so simple! The integrity of the job is the problem. It's been coded to failover problems (as the original data integrity its mining from isn't good), so it will happily do something stupid for hours. That's why I have to watch it, and make sure its not doing something stupid. Unit tests would ensure stupidity was not a possibility, and regressions could be tracked. Too late for that, unfortunately. So I watch.
    - rcfox 15y ago
      Couldn't you write unit tests while you wait?
      - Lewisham 15y ago
        Fair point :)
  - paulbaumgart 15y ago
    Whoops. Too late to edit, but a correction: growlnotify -m "Success! " (the space tells bash to treat the exclamation point as text)
    - rcfox 15y ago
      Or just use \!
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
      - paulbaumgart 15y ago
        Good call. Though for multi-word messages, you'd have to do something like: growlnotify -m "$(echo Great\! Success\!)"
        qntm 15y ago
        For arbitrary messages: sub escape { my $arg = shift; $arg =~ s/([^a-zA-Z0-9_])/\\$1/g; return $arg; }

bartl 15y ago

http://xkcd.com/303/ http://xkcd.com/303/ ?

keeran 15y ago

Or a long-running test/spec suite :)

lars512 15y ago

That's one of the legitimate reasons to switch to an interpreted language, or else Go. Unless you value your compilation off-time :)