samhw

40 ms·

391.
by samhw 5y ago
I'd agree with this, but this is orthogonal to tech debt IMO. Tech debt is a trade-off of a simpler / less extensible implementation in exchange for faster product / business validation of experimental (in some sense) code.
392.
by samhw 5y ago
Yeah, certainly the tech debt code should be thrown away. I think this is hard to discuss without a concrete example in mind, though. Or rather without both having the same concrete example in mind . I get the sense that everyone here is
393.
by samhw 5y ago
These are the people we avoid like the plague when hiring: people who are obsessed with the intrinsic beauty of their code, rather than its business utility. They're welcome to do that with their own code in their own time (and many pe
394.
by samhw 5y ago
This is a really excellent constructive way of framing it. Thanks for posting this!
395.
by samhw 5y ago
Yeah, that's where the engineer/s need/s to be able to explain things clearly to non-technical stakeholders - which is vital for many other things besides this. I think our hypothetical company would likely founder on any of
396.
by samhw 5y ago
No one is saying you have to needlessly screw things up. If you're writing things in an equally laborious but worse way, that's just being a bad programmer – nothing to do with tech debt. Tech debt is more, say, "let's
397.
by samhw 5y ago
Yeah, this feeling is ubiquitous among programmers (or 'developers' perhaps), and I suspect it's a large reason why businesspeople are suspicious of "we need to invest time paying down tech debt". There's a big
398.
by samhw 5y ago
It doesn't even require management to be unreasonable/intransigent/whatever. It's perfectly rational to write a prototype feature in a quick and hacky way, and then invest time in making it clean and extensible after yo
399.
by samhw 5y ago
Well, that seems like a wasteful amount of time to spend on prototype products or functionality. It's up to you if you want to do that, but other people will likely out-manoeuvre you by being agile enough to iterate quickly.
400.
by samhw 5y ago
The point of technical debt is that you don't want to invest an amount of time appropriate for [long-term business-critical feature which will be built upon] into something which is currently [basic experimental feature which may well
401.
by samhw 5y ago
> In software, I would use an unicode string internally, then when writing out I would encoded that to utf-8. I don't understand what distinction you're drawing here? UTF-8 is Unicode. In what way would you be modifying it at
402.
by samhw 5y ago
I think it’s because the word “anonymous” permeates our understanding of the concept, and – even for people who didn’t actually study Greek – the tie to “name” is clear. We need to understand that “knowing someone’s identity” is not coexten
403.
by samhw 5y ago
I wonder if your father intended it? It's funny to think the joke might have gone unnoticed all those years!
404.
by samhw 5y ago
That's a long paragraph, but, as far as I can tell, doesn't contain a shred of the evidence or sources I asked for? The one concrete detail you mention is 'Yuri Noseko' [Nosenko], who seemingly was a defector imprisoned
405.
by samhw 5y ago
> When you want to send another signal, the US is not shy at all about killing them. What information is this based on? I don't have any particularly strong opinions on this subject, but I can't recall ever reading about anythi
406.
by samhw 5y ago
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, or genuinely giving a list of minuscule island chains, culminating in the country that's literally the universal metonym for 'middle of nowhere'.
407.
by samhw 5y ago
> “Enlarge the margins… shrink the margins…” Is the pun intended?
408.
by samhw 5y ago
That's not a terrible idea. People likely underestimate how much of the legal system runs on - essentially - sensible human discretion in applying rules like that one.
409.
by samhw 5y ago
Eh, there are upsides to this. Litigation funds (which invest to buy speculative chunks of 'promising' lawsuits) do enable people to sue large companies when they otherwise wouldn't have had the wherewithal. That said, it&#x2
410.
by samhw 5y ago
Heya, sorry for the delayed response (naturally, this being HN, I didn't catch your reply, and you probably won't catch mine, haha). Thanks very much for the personal message. I'll set up a personal account and give it a spin
411.
by samhw 5y ago
That's very true. That's why I'm in favour of something like this, I think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30058898 It's not totally 'not cloud', but it's pragmatic, and would at lea
412.
by samhw 5y ago
Hey - I wanted to say that I came across a comment of yours from more than a decade ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2328627 ), and I was startled at how accurate it is as a prediction of how parsers and IDEs are co
413.
by samhw 5y ago
I think someone writes this blog post approximately every 17 minutes. It's a crowd favourite. I sometimes think you could power this site on a regular cycle of: - [popular software] uses more memory than things did when I was a young&#
414.
by samhw 5y ago
You really shouldn't read the history of rock 'n roll if a hookah is shocking... ;) But yes, it's a way of smoking something -- like a bong or a pipe, it's agnostic as to its contents -- through water. Essentially it&#x2
415.
by samhw 5y ago
> Inertia seems to best describe the hesitancy to change. I'd have gone for 'rigor mortis', but hey, we can't agree on everything ... like, say, a very minor change to string encoding with a 12-year managed rollout.
416.
by samhw 5y ago
I think this exchange sums up the debate over Go itself...
417.
by samhw 5y ago
Hmm, I had a look at their blog, and I have mixed feelings. Lots of it is stupid. Lots of the titles contain spelling errors that would be embarrassing for a 14-year-old. But some of it is thoughtful and interesting, albeit basic, like th
418.
by samhw 5y ago
It's not unheard of. A few examples come to mind: - Go By Example: https://gobyexample.com/ - Rust By Example: https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/ - V [a weird knockoff of Go] By Example:
419.
by samhw 5y ago
That's fantastic! I'll have to take a look. Thanks for showing me. I was aware of Heroku, but this seems like the modern equivalent which I had in mind. (I do think you could likely go even simpler , though - there's a whole
420.
by samhw 5y ago
This is why I think we need a 'simple cloud' where people can spin up a single server nearly instantly, with sane defaults which are configurable if needed, and a super simple flow to connect it to GitHub (maybe even "Go to y

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