bluesnowmonkey

8 ms·

61.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
Commercial software isn't generally an artisanal crafting process. If you're a programmer who solves variations of a problem, analogous to a carpenter building varieties of cabinets, then you have parameterized tools. When the cli
62.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
> The problem is that in programming the discovery part is often 90% of the task. That's exactly it. Scoping out the solution is 90% as hard as just doing it. By the time you've figured out enough of the details that you'r
63.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
> Instead we define the direction, the purpose, the reason, and a few specific "must haves" up front. The rest — all the rest, which is mostly everything — is determined during the project, by the people on the project. If you
64.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
popcount?
65.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
Sure, Rust is fast, but Python is really, aggressively slow. They could rewrite in basically any compiled language (or even some of the dynamic ones) and come out way ahead. It's such a frustrating experience trying to wring halfway de
66.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
There are several failure modes I see from lack of big picture thinking: - A system is left running for years even though we no longer need it as a business. Millions of dollars wasted because no one had a ticket for "think about wheth
67.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
If someone needs a quiet space to focus, there's nothing wrong with giving them a closed door office.
68.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
Based on my experience watching How It’s Made, many factories are extremely automated including lots of robots. Warehouses are not factories though.
69.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
I agree with hnrodey, and here’s the thing: trying to game this metric is a pretty good way to turn into an actually productive programmer! People who crank out lots of small, easy tasks build up a lot of the very skills they need to take o
70.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
He was making an absurd statement to prove a point. No need to go all Good Will Hunting on us.
71.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
But generally speaking, human beings can’t write like Shakespeare either.
72.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
What is bracket folding? What kind of brackets is this even talking about? Read the whole page, tried to interact with the “Try it here” section, still have no clue whatsoever what this is supposed to be.
73.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
At large scale, the queries you can handle are limited by the indexes you have in place, and you can’t index everything. So you already have to think about which queries you’ll really need. There’s also caching, which is another side of the
74.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
> After a while, you will have created a majority of the potential things you can create and everything will start to look the same. This sounds like the famous quote: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” It’s as wrong no
75.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
This is saying, it’s better to go slowly and build things well and not have bugs or production issues. Which is totally right, but does take patience and can seem a little “boring” in a way. It’s one of the agile principles. > Continuous
76.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
Self driving cars are just a little early. They won’t work until gradually they will, which is a threshold we’re arguably already crossing. So it doesn’t really belong on the list. And machine learning is massively successful and growing. O
77.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
Everyone’s job in a business is solving business problems. Programmers do that mainly by programming. Otherwise we wouldn’t call them programmers.
78.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
Pushing it in terms of performance and complexity. We have high QPS and need low latency, a few milliseconds to do a lot of work. Baseline performance of nice idiomatic Elixir is good enough mostly for general business logic. Tools like Rec
79.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
We’ve used Phoenix for 5 years for an important internal project in a large tech company. We don’t do a ton with Phoenix itself, it’s just a simple MVC web app for managing a more complicated Elixir thing. No Liveview or even Ecto, for inst
80.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
Software reuse-in-the-small is a solved problem, but reuse-in-the-large seems unsolvable. That’s been the state of things for decades. Testing is hard because the requirement for correctness is often absolute and inflexible. When software i
81.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
The people you perceive as getting “picked” for good projects are in reality probably generating those opportunities for themselves. You can do it. Ask around and figure out what the important problems are for your organization, who is thin
82.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
A vote for adding the abstractions now you think you’ll need later. I found once we crossed around the 1000 engineer mark, the main abstractions were so baked in that refactoring projects started taking years. Longer than the typical employ
83.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
He starts with this misleading premise, which sends everything in the wrong direction: > The software developer defence is that every software development task is doing something new, but this isn’t really true, most software development
84.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
The most important criteria for me is that I only be on call for the things I built. Night and day difference in terms of tolerability. If it wakes me, I should have built it better. So I work really hard to build things that don’t page.
85.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
I think it’s a little disrespectful to resurrect someone’s comment they tried to delete. It’s their comment, and we don’t know their reasons for deleting it.
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by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
As an interviewer I ding people who don’t understand the underlying capabilities. They often matter! Like if the design depends on modifying two keys atomically, a transaction is required. Some KV stores have that ability, some don’t. Do yo
87.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
Here’s the issue: /api/v1/employees/<employee_id> These URLs, which philosophically we’re trying to convince each other are opaque resource identifiers, are actually structured requests. There is an API bein
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by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
The min heap would need to live in the process heap of a particular process. It would only be accessible by that process, so other processes would need to interact with it by sending messages to the "min heap" process and waiting
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by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
Yes, match_delete would work. Even a little better, select_delete will return the number of entries that were purged. To delete everything where the third element in a tuple is greater than a constant, should be something like: :ets.sel
90.
by bluesnowmonkey 4y ago
I chose to kill the cat, because there are too many of them and they devastate natural ecosystems, killing birds for instance. Lobsters on the other hand are badly depopulated. In both cases undoing a wrong committed by humanity.

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