desc

14 ms·

61.
by desc 7y ago
Government enforcing and supporting monopoly is government not doing its job. Look to the individuals responsible, particularly those who've constructed the incentives for other parts of government to support such monopolies. Left to t
62.
by desc 7y ago
It's outperformed at basic arithmetic by fairly simple electronic circuits too. Which is probably your point :P Right tool for the right job. The problem is that when you have a hammer called machine learning, every problem looks like
63.
by desc 7y ago
Of the failure modes I've had to deal with, even when we did use a lot of interpreted scripts which could be live-patched, very few of the important issues were fixable that way. Because the stuff which broke was rare and deep . One
64.
by desc 7y ago
Fair enough, it certainly seems to offer benefits re. flexibility and rapid development. I'm just too used to being the person who then has to make the server deal with this particular use case (meaning a million possible variations
65.
by desc 7y ago
'Combine a subset of pre-defined queries': you mean run a bunch of queries and perform the join locally? Like a poorly-designed app server 're-using' several repository methods and doing joins in-memory? I may be misunde
66.
by desc 7y ago
Yes, I'm not criticising Dhall so much as the behaviours it permits. IMO it should be difficult to 'program' the generation of a config file, because the application should be designed such that that degree of flexibility i
67.
by desc 7y ago
Yes, that's the problem. I'd like to be able to look at a config file, on disk, loaded at startup, which defines the initial state of the server without having to think through how it was evaluated. Generating the config during de
68.
by desc 7y ago
Programmable configuration is always and without exception a monumentally stupid idea. Programmatic generation of static configuration files can be very useful. Sufficiently complex examples of the latter might as well be the former as fa
69.
by desc 7y ago
I can see absolutely no positive value whatsoever in GraphQL for internal APIs. You're basically saying 'please, formulate any query you like, and I will waste years of my life trying to optimise that general case'. Seriously
70.
by desc 7y ago
When I started programming, I'd think up lots of clever ways to avoid repeating things. Ten years on, that code is a nightmare to maintain because changing the behaviour for just one call site of hundreds is next to impossible, becau
71.
by desc 7y ago
As others have commented, the problem here is the ranking algorithm and how it can be gamed. Essentially, trust. 'Web of trust' has its flaws too: a sufficiently large number of malicious nodes cooperating can subvert the network.
72.
by desc 7y ago
Agree. These two snippets inspired /facepalm: > While Twitter is a free service, I would still expect some level of assistance for someone who has had the same account for 13 years and can get thousands of people to verify my identi
73.
by desc 7y ago
It doesn't need to be centralised, and it doesn't even need to be limited by RTT. 'Zero fraud risk': you cannot prevent people from finding loopholes. Every system breaks. Instead, you use the same techniques that have b
74.
by desc 7y ago
I'd argue that this sort of thing is fine, as long as the `return` is not nested deeply. A function which starts with a list of 'early exit' simple conditions is fairly easy to deal with, compared with one where you need to r
75.
by desc 7y ago
I like this interpretation. I think the entire reason my social awkwardness has diminished in the past decade is that I've learned to ignore worries about how people see me and just focused on trying to make things better whenever the
76.
by desc 7y ago
Thoughts on this: * Config should never, ever be written by the application which depends on it. Ever. I don't care what you think your rationale is: no application should modify its own configuration. - Git is a weird case which sprin
77.
by desc 8y ago
Trusting any government to regulate massively-powerful information clearing houses is a mistake, because they will inevitably, eventually, and maybe even (best case) unintentionally abuse it for their own ends, as history has demonstrated.
78.
by desc 8y ago
Indeed. I think the key point here is that even if the rewrite 'only' takes 4 years, how many new features have been added to the original codebase (maintained for 'continuity') in the meantime? There's usually some
79.
by desc 8y ago
In the codebase I maintain, this boils down to a 'gradual rewrite from the outside in' combined with refactoring bits of the 'in' where practical. You create new independent code paths on the way 'in' instead o
80.
by desc 8y ago
The problem, as always, is externalisation of costs. If they don't pay for the consequences of the risks they take (such as prioritising profits over security, etc) market forces demand that they take those risks. People talk about the
81.
by desc 8y ago
Mmm, that's a fair set of points. I don't think that content should be produced for free, but I argue that advertising-by-invasion-by-default is only acceptable now because not enough people called it out early enough, because the
82.
by desc 8y ago
My approach to this these days is: * all configuration, without exception, is XML. * all configuration may be generated from any other format imaginable, but it's sure as fuck going into the Big Main Godlike Application as XML. Separat
83.
by desc 8y ago
It's a good thing that platform providers are locking down this sort of thing. The problem is a culture of 'it's ok, everyone else does it, the world runs on it, maybe things need to change, but we need to find an alternative
84.
by desc 8y ago
I don't see how this conflicts, exactly. Time is indeed a major factor, but money is not orthogonal: below a certain level of income (which depends on the person's circumstances) it impacts the amount of available time too, with c
85.
by desc 8y ago
My intuition was already screaming 'it'll be the other way around for a geometric progression' before I read that far, but I'm damned if I can understand or even speculate why. Most likely I don't properly understan
86.
by desc 8y ago
The rule we use is: DAGgy fixes for preference, then create multiple fix/feature branches and use rebases to eliminate conflicts. The idea is that each individual branch is based on a commit chosen such that it won't conflict when
87.
by desc 8y ago
It's the same problem everything suffers from: meeting targets rather than doing a good job.
88.
by desc 8y ago
Tags do not fit spatial memory. Tags are utterly worthless in any spatial context. You're at the mercy of a search engine's implementation and index foibles for finding things through search queries. A hierarchy maps onto our spat
89.
by desc 8y ago
Good point, but creating infrastructure doesn't necessarily mean creating idioms on the compiler level: neither DSLs nor macros. I would reject both without solid evidence that a good method and object API in the host language couldn&#
90.
by desc 8y ago
This. Visibility into what is actually going on, and the drive to understand it . Troubleshooting, debugging, learning: all the same thing, but tarred with different parts of the process. Dig into what's actually going on and understa

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