nickm12

10 ms·

121.
by nickm12 3y ago
This is great advice. It's called "gradual typing" for a reason. You should set things up so that your new code has typing enforced and then you gradually add typing to older code opportunistically. I've used Mypy and th
122.
by nickm12 3y ago
I previously worked at Dropbox, which had server codebase consisting of over 2 million lines of (untyped) Python. While I was there, Dropbox introduced type annotations into the codebase and used it as a testing group for Mypy, which was be
123.
by nickm12 3y ago
You're putting "correctness" in quotes as though it is a matter of being polite to the machine. The Rust compilation process depends on these invariants so that the code actually executes as written (specifically, has no unde
124.
by nickm12 3y ago
> I've been working, ... in an environment dominated by people with a background in math or physics who often have sparse knowledge of "software engineering". ... Invariably, the biggest messes are made by the minority of
125.
by nickm12 3y ago
Depending on the context, I definitely think of commits as all three of diff, snapshot, or history. When I'm coding, I think of myself as "authoring a change" and the commit I post for code review, and later rebase, is the ch
126.
by nickm12 3y ago
I have not heard anything about legislation, but the NSA and CISA have been arguing for the industry to embrace memory safe languages: https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Press-Releases-Statements/Pre... Even without l
127.
by nickm12 3y ago
I didn't find this post very illuminating. It needs some actual examples of typed code and how the different interpretations would apply. The linked Wikipedia article actually did have an example, and it helped me understand a bit bett
128.
by nickm12 3y ago
I have to go with "something else". I can "visualize" the elephant's head, but I don't "see" it. That is, I can perceive a visual image of sorts, but its clarity is on par with seeing something at nig
129.
by nickm12 3y ago
In 2021, I was driving in San Francisco a little south of Golden Gate park and was immediately behind a White Model S with the "WOZ" plate. I got so excited my daughter thought I was a little weird. I wasn't able to confirm h
130.
by nickm12 3y ago
It creates a temp branch and then pushes two commits onto it, one for the currently staged changes and one for the currently unstaged changes. It then checks out the original branch and reverts the file by checking out the previous version
131.
by nickm12 3y ago
Coming up on 10 years ago, I got completely fed up with git's bullshit. I decided what commands I needed to get my job done, and then implemented them as a set of aliases in my .gitconfig. It currently has 72 aliases and another 35 lin
132.
by nickm12 3y ago
No, it's not sensible, just sloppy naming plain and simple. Good naming takes effort and it just wasn't done by git's early developers.
133.
by nickm12 3y ago
The phrase "blazingly fast" is tightly associated with Apple in my mind. Some searching finds that it was part of the marketing of the Power Mac G4 in 1999. No idea if it was used earlier, but The Forbes article even puts the phra
134.
by nickm12 3y ago
Oof. Yeah, I've done a lot of different styles of commutes (walk, bike, public transit, drive) over the years. My favorite is something that is ~20 minutes door to door involving physical activity (walking or biking). It does help trem
135.
by nickm12 3y ago
Yes. It was probably a little more. 10 minutes driving, 45 minutes train, 10 minutes walking each way. I could use the train time for other things but it was very crowded in those days and often standing room only. It was too long, even if
136.
by nickm12 3y ago
Discussion of the article here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37929338
137.
by nickm12 3y ago
As a former Dropbox employee, I find this wryly amusing. I remember attending a company-wide all hands in 2016 or so where someone asked about having a satellite office in the South San Francisco Bay (the company HQ was in San Francisco at
138.
by nickm12 3y ago
I agree that Meta doesn't seems like the type of company that would attract that type of passion. My comment is more that, even with that prior, the near total lack of it was still surprising. I've personally known some Meta emplo
139.
by nickm12 3y ago
It's disheartening that pretty much all of these questions are about playing the game of working in a large tech company. I mean, I get it. It's Blind and it's rare to get candid access to a director who can tell you how the
140.
by nickm12 3y ago
I disagree with Massie and also with the notion that there should be more climate change deniers like him in Congress.
141.
by nickm12 3y ago
21 year old bug. June 2002 is not 22 years ago, despite what Bugzilla thinks.
142.
by nickm12 3y ago
This is my preferred style by far, but it seems like most junior programmers I work with don't seem to mind the style with deeply nested ifs and far away exceptional elses. I try to avoid commenting on such stuff in code reviews unless
143.
by nickm12 3y ago
Seems kind of similar to Amazon Ion: https://amzn.github.io/ion-docs/ Some differences: EDN has characters, keywords, lists, and sets Ion has dates, decimals, timestamps, s-expressions, and blobs Ion has a binary seria
144.
by nickm12 3y ago
I don't understand why you are being downvoted. You're absolutely right, though I'd nitpick and say not say "untyped" but that the only types that XML gives you are dom nodes and strings. Contrast that with JSON, wh
145.
by nickm12 3y ago
This is confusing correlation with causation. You can look at this data and say "Apple has the best customers" or you can look at this data and say (less sensationally) "Apple doesn't sell phones for people with little d
146.
by nickm12 3y ago
I respectfully disagree. :) The leadership principle is agnostic to the roles—the point is that people should not go along with decisions due to social cohesion but should express their disagreements and make their case. However, once a dec
147.
by nickm12 3y ago
Heh. I just looked up an exchange I had with Bare Bones support from 2001 (!) about the hard-wrap-as-you-type feature. This was an early BBE feature that was removed when they added soft wrapping. I tried to argue for this feature but was
148.
by nickm12 3y ago
As a Gen Xer, it's wryly amusing to hear today's internet referred to as "Web 2.0". What we have today is not what I think of when I hear "Web 2.0". I'm sure there are internet scholars who can give some f
149.
by nickm12 3y ago
"Shell scripts are great at tricking you into believing you've got something 100% working" Exactly. Shell scripting is basically a non-hygenic macro language, with very complex semantics around its primary data type, the stri
150.
by nickm12 3y ago
Avoiding "C/C++" is good advice. C/C++ people hate it when you do that.

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