ken

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331.
by ken 7y ago
What statically typed language lets me define a type as “number between -180 and +180”, or “string which contains only alphanumeric chars”? I think that would be a great feature but from what I see static typing fails here, too.
332.
by ken 7y ago
> The tech industry nowadays is no longer about solving real-world problems and making the world a better place Your complaints are legitimate problems with the industry, but it should come as no surprise that a free market does not alwa
333.
by ken 7y ago
> success by accident Sadly, it doesn't seem to be uncommon for a company (even Apple) to hit a home run and not understand why it was so successful. And then they're unable to follow up on it. HyperCard still appears in top
334.
by ken 7y ago
Absolutely, but there's more than one reason to buy a product, and people buying the cheapest and smallest model with last year's technology aren't generally the novelty-seeking "gotta have it" people. Especially p
335.
by ken 7y ago
> Additionally the malleable system has a price, which for most is bigger than it's benefits. And yet here we are, talking in a web browser, the most malleable modern environment of all. We’re not running some forum-only app, like w
336.
by ken 7y ago
I wouldn’t call that it’s only success. It’s an application that’s been used and maintained for 40 years. It’s the application that practically spawned the Free Software movement. It’s one of the most portable programs I’ve ever seen. The
337.
by ken 7y ago
Knot means nautical mile per hour. It’s not a short way to say “nautical mile”.
338.
by ken 7y ago
> SF in general tends to rely on the "whig view of history": technological development and social progress moving forwards. Notable exception: Cloud Atlas (pub. 2004), which admits that "Tortuous advances won over generati
339.
by ken 7y ago
Did support improve recently? On Mojave with a MacBook trackpad, it's super janky.
340.
by ken 7y ago
> one of the few programming languages that correctly doesn’t treat file paths as strings I hear: one of those few programming languages that, despite its vaunted type-safety, makes it possible to accidentally create a file with a comple
341.
by ken 7y ago
To me, that's a design flaw. Would we really be any worse off if we simply declared filenames must be UTF-8? That seems to be the only case where a user-visible and user-editable field is allowed to be an arbitrary byte sequence, and
342.
by ken 7y ago
There was a link on HN yesterday about how Emacs was a great success for 'malleable software' because despite being less flexible than some other programmable systems, it came with a built-in application that was usable out-of-the
343.
by ken 7y ago
It's interesting to hear the standardization perspective, because it's pretty much the opposite of my perspective as a user. I see the classic path of any programming language -- regardless of standardization -- is to continuously
344.
by ken 7y ago
Curiously, hospitals have seen a stark drop in heart attacks, strokes, and other common issues, so this may not actually be a very large number. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/well/live/coronavir
345.
by ken 7y ago
> There are enough source of diversity in humanity to not need to add it to the very structure we use to exchange information. Strongly disagree. Who are we to decide which aspects of someone else’s culture are worth saving, and which c
346.
by ken 7y ago
Sounds even better! Is there some example of colonialism which you think is worth preserving, to the destruction of their culture? Should Ireland stop being Irish, should Korea become a Japanese colony again, or should we reunite the USSR
347.
by ken 7y ago
Time to re-read SICP?
348.
by ken 7y ago
But why do we need to deliver paper letters ? As ezrast says below, the real goal is a "reliable communications network", which I agree with wholeheartedly. In the 18th century, that was spelled "Post Offices and Post Roads
349.
by ken 7y ago
Most stores in my area are offering free curbside pickup now. Moving to pickup- only would significantly lower the human contact, both employee/customer and customer/customer. Nobody is talking about giving up on existing suppl
350.
by ken 7y ago
That might be stretching the definition of "deterministic". If it depends on implicit state, precise timing, external conditions, etc., I would say it's closer to fitting the definition of "chaotic" than "dete
351.
by ken 7y ago
My experience with Illustrator was that it made no sense, so I went and read the first 50 pages of the (excellent) manual, and then I understood everything. It taught basic principles of the application philosophy which explained everythin
352.
by ken 7y ago
You don't need a rare "UX engineer". The issues here are much more fundamental. On a Core i7 with 16 GB of RAM, dragging one object on an otherwise empty canvas gives me about 1 fps. You don't need any special "pr
353.
by ken 7y ago
Hopefully removing a whole extra layer will make it easier to profile and improve, both for Mac tools and for Mac developers. One of my main complaints about Firefox is that everything is so completely custom (even the parts that look &#x2
354.
by ken 7y ago
Indeed. The elephant in the room that this post missed is that email was created by researchers, not corporations. Today, a huge swath of computer science progress is created by corporations. We're making great strides in areas whic
355.
by ken 7y ago
Where did you look? I clicked the "GitHub" link at the top, which is the standard way to bypass marketing fluff and get to an actual program. The README has instructions for installing from source, verifying the installation, co
356.
by ken 7y ago
Here is touch.c [1] from macOS. The only change since Lion is the addition of the __used attribute on a couple of consts at the beginning. It's very similar to the FreeBSD one, though they've diverged slightly in the past 2 deca
357.
by ken 7y ago
In my experience, SQL is successful despite its syntax, not because of it. Wasn't it originally intended to be an end-user interface? It's failed at that. Now even programmers choose to use an ORM to insulate themselves from
358.
by ken 7y ago
I love the idea of combining an outliner and an SRS. I don't love the idea of needing a new special editor for them, and a new siloed data store for them. Now, if this were an SRS that read my existing data (like from Notes.app, org-m
359.
by ken 7y ago
...if there was only one common datetime library, and it pulled in 800 MB of dependencies. In that case, I might default to using unix timestamps, too, despite the edge cases.
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by ken 7y ago
> Programmers work with text and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Programmers work with 2D overlapping windows and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I'm giving a criterion for when that's goi

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