chriswarbo

31 ms·

391.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
> Because of the lock files, flakes are also faster I consider lock files to be labour-intensive work-arounds for fundamental design problems. One of the things I like about Nix is that its design doesn't need them, and even allows
392.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
> Edit: I wondered about using a separate Blockchain to maintain consensus on the "central" representation of the repo that we get from a "git server". There's nothing special about a "git server": you
393.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
> All these workflows are a derivation of the source in the repository and keeping them close together has a great aesthetic. I agree. Version control is a great enabler, so using it to track "sources" other than just code can
394.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
> without stashing your changes You can do reviews in a separate clone, to avoid interrupting any changes you're making (reading the diff only needs a 'git fetch', so won't interfere with anything; but making changes
395.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
> In the case it is or it really needs an explanation it stays in the codebase, otherwise you take it, e.g. to GitHub issues or PR comments. Another thing that's easy, but often overlooked: putting relevant URLs in comments. The bes
396.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
What counts as a function definition? def a(): b() a() import random with open("max", "r") as f: m = int(f.read()) b = (lambda: "foo") if int(input("Pick a number: ")) % m > rando
397.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
> A list of ingredients is hard work. openai.gpt4.prompt(f”gimme a recipe using {ingredients}”) is much less work. Sure, but it's amazing to me that: - Web devs would allow free-form text input, rather than selecting from known opti
398.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
> I added a bunch of stuff that doesn't really fit together, and it used every single one of them to create something. Even worse, it will happily make a recipe out of 'foo', 'bar' and 'baz': "Slic
399.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
> the fudge-factor physicists call Dark Matter/Energy Those are two very different fudge factors (as in, those hypotheses are distinct; the observations they attempt to explain may turn out to have a single cause instead, but we don
400.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
> Docker (or container images in general) are great but they solve a limited set of problems well and tend to hide others. I like container images and runtimes. Docker is awful, and its "inside-out" approach encourages and enfo
401.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
No, I don't understand why this myth persists. Docker fetches tarballs, runs commands, and tars up directories. Often, Docker is used to run package management commands (e.g. `apt`, `dpkg`, `yum`, `cargo`, `mvn`, `nix`, `cabal`, `sbt`,
402.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
> it felt almost like cheating since it did pretty much every thing for me During my undergrad I implemented a semester-long physics project in about 30 minutes. The supervisor had previously taught the Programming in C module, so I aske
403.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
> There is no perfect system. So what? FPTP is objectively the worst voting method, across pretty much all metrics (others may do slightly worse at local representation). Also, proportional representation is a class of voting methods (
404.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
> Enough unit testing will test everything the type system can Depends on the type system. For example, if we have parametricity then we can constrain possible values quite a lot; e.g. a value with type 'forall t. t -> t' is
405.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
More reading BTW: - 'Yield: Mainstream Delimited Continuations' builds them up by generalising for/yield (rather than try/throw), but the result is the same: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
406.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
Dependency management is a common example; e.g. we want A; A depends on B and C; B depends on D or E; C conflicts with D; etc. These are all constraints, and we can ask a system like MiniZinc to find a set of packages which don't confl
407.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
I've used OptaPlanner in production, it was pretty straightforward and coped perfectly well with the few-hundred-variable problems we needed it for (we ran it with a timeout, and its solutions were good). If you're comfortable pro
408.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
> Could you clarify (or provide more reading on) how the other systems like delimited continuations, algebraic effects, and monads differ from Zig async + how they could be adapted in a similarly unopinionated/low-level way? The key
409.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
Is there a reason async/await is being implemented specifically, rather than some more generally-useful primitive (like delimited continuations, algebraic effect handling, functor/applicative/monad, etc.[0])? When it comes to
410.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
I try new fonts every now and then, but always find myself going back to Droid Sans Mono (looks very clear at tiny sizes). However, I switched to Iosevka a month ago (found by Googling for narrow monospace fonts), since its narrow enough to
411.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
> All processors are C VMs at the end of the day. That would be a poor argument back in the 80s; and is increasingly wrong for modern processors. Compiler intrinsics can paper-over some of the conceptual gap, but dropping down to inline
412.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
> sometimes I wish there was just a standard language for programming Good news, there is such a standard, and you can buy it here: https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/incits/ansix3531976r1998 Some choice quote
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by chriswarbo 3y ago
I took it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36748080 but have seen it used occasionally elsewhere (e.g. Reddit's r/fuckcars )
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by chriswarbo 3y ago
I agree with what you say, but would still replace the word "bike" with "moped". If it has a throttle, it is not a bike.
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by chriswarbo 3y ago
They're useful on the train (my commute's train didn't allow nonfolding bikes, since the line heads to/from London which makes it crowded). I previously left my acoustic bike locked at the station all day; but wouldn&#x2
416.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
> The Cycle-to-Work scheme as I remember it is problematic in that you're not buying the bike, but virtually leasing it from your employer for a period of time (1 year?) That's just a technicality, I assume to make it comply wi
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by chriswarbo 3y ago
Nix represents its builds in a way that's similar: each "derivation" is a text file like /nix/store/XXXXXXX-foo.drv, where XXXXXX is a hash of that file's content. This way each file can reference any othe
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by chriswarbo 3y ago
True, the dynamics I stated are pretty broad (scarily so!): they don't describe why any particular set of ideas will take hold or not. The ones which appear will certainly depend on politics, as various goals/agendas are pushed
419.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
"Conspiracy theory" is nothing more/less than attributing the cause of something to manipulation by some (usually secret) group, i.e. a conspiracy. Some are correct, some are wrong. Believing the Earth is flat isn't a co
420.
by chriswarbo 3y ago
LLMs can't reason about spelling, e.g. asking for a sentence which contains no letter "a"; and can also struggle with rhyming, etc. The most obvious explanation is that they never 'see' the underlying letters/s

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