tikhonj

25 ms·

361.
by tikhonj 2y ago
1. You can do it better, with better taste. Existing tools are... not uniformly well-designed. 2. Building something for yourself is qualitatively different than building something for somebody else. (I've heard this described as &qu
362.
by tikhonj 2y ago
Jane Street has been doing this since they were much smaller. I interned there when they had like 300 people, and they were actively cultivating a great brand as an employer back then too—and looks like they've really made it work ov
363.
by tikhonj 2y ago
You can't just disclaim all legal liability like that. Lots of businesses have you sign waivers that absolve them of all liability in the even of injury or death even if caused by negligence , but they can still be successfully sued o
364.
by tikhonj 3y ago
Only a silicon valley programmer... and virtually every modern(ist) government in the past 150+ years? Attempting and failing to centrally control cities has been a recurring motif for ages. I'd love to say it's changing, and mayb
365.
by tikhonj 3y ago
Sure, it misrepresents the valuation in the same way that deal structuring (liquidation preferences/etc) does in cash investments. The valuation you get by multiplying the cash value of the investment by the equity that was sold is jus
366.
by tikhonj 3y ago
I'd read this as "rare because it is a Vermeer " rather than "rare for* a Vermeer".
367.
by tikhonj 3y ago
That quote is also just factually wrong because we can have partial orders, or even just have a lot of totally different essays that happen to be equally good.
368.
by tikhonj 3y ago
I don't have an exact number in mind—I imagine it's pretty context-specific—but 500–1000 nodes seems like it would qualify. I've played around with IntMap before and it's not a great data structure. It's a binary
369.
by tikhonj 3y ago
FGL is a great example of how to make a "nice" high-level graph interface suited for functional programming. I'm a big fan. But it's orders of magnitude too slow and memory-inefficient for performance-sensitive graph com
370.
by tikhonj 3y ago
> Performance is good enough, it's not the intellectual masturbation of Scala or Rust. As we know, any technology that would require experienced programmers to learn something is a crime against engineering.
371.
by tikhonj 3y ago
The lesson here should not be "make illegal states representable", but rather "the state of the form widget in the UI" and "the state of the value the form represents" are conceptually distinct. We should expli
372.
by tikhonj 3y ago
I worked at a large organization and yet didn't have to put up with anything Jira-like and top-down. Ticket-based development is neither necessary nor sufficient—nor even particularly effective—for coordinating software development at
373.
by tikhonj 3y ago
Oh, cool to hear you're using NixOS. The Nix philosophy totally gels with the philosophy described in the post. But it's also probably fair to describe NixOS as something weird that somebody else wrote :)
374.
by tikhonj 3y ago
You've never run into issues where unclear, undocumented, misunderstood or inconsistent interfaces were a significant contributing factor?
375.
by tikhonj 3y ago
A Suburban is as much a class signifier as a G Class, just for a different class. Hell, it's in the name: it's the car of the suburban middle classes. It's the minivan for the sort of kind of person who would get a minivan bu
376.
by tikhonj 3y ago
Maybe we should have a higher standard for quality developer tools than enterprise shovelware?
377.
by tikhonj 3y ago
At the end of the day, things get popular through social processes, so it's far more a matter of social factors—some of which are practically random—than any intrinsic qualities of the thing itself.
378.
by tikhonj 3y ago
The public doesn't have the resources to train the largest state-of-the-art LLMs, but training useful LLMs seems doable. Maybe not for most individuals but certainly for a range of nonprofits, research teams and companies.
379.
by tikhonj 3y ago
> completely trust to turn my source code into machine code accurately Say hello to undefined behavior :) Appropriately enough, much of the reason undefined behavior is a consistent problem is exactly the same—it can do something reaso
380.
by tikhonj 3y ago
Yeah, it's crazy how common that view seems to be in the industry for something that simply does not make sense . What people call "velocity" is an inherently relative measure, but they insist on treating it as an absolute.
381.
by tikhonj 3y ago
Those comments are totally consistent! If you hadn't hired X employees in the first place, you wouldn't be laying them off now. And, conversely, if you can afford to lay them off now, you could have afforded not to hire them earli
382.
by tikhonj 3y ago
> At what point, and how do you determine that? By looking at the research? By understanding what kind of studies and experiments are actually viable? By evaluating what we can measure effectively, what we can't, and how good (or
383.
by tikhonj 3y ago
> Static typing does not reduce logic bugs. This seems like a strong statement to make based on the research. What I've seen falls into several camps: - research that made some conclusion about logic bugs for complete beginners
384.
by tikhonj 3y ago
There is more than some fuzziness to the data! At some point, measuring something sufficiently poorly is worse than not measuring it at all, and the empirical efforts I've seen to evaluate things I care about (programming languages,
385.
by tikhonj 3y ago
I remember in high school I was confused by pointers because it did not make sense to allocate something and return a pointer instead of just returning the thing itself. Then in senior year of high school I discovered Haskell and realized t
386.
by tikhonj 3y ago
Frankly, the classic algorithms courses at universities aren't great either. The set of "classic" algorithms covered in an intro course is arbitrary and comes down to history more than pedagogy. There are some useful concepts
387.
by tikhonj 3y ago
Tail calls also matter for code in continuation-passing style (CPS). This matters for some styles of programming (callbacks/promises/monads/etc), but it's also very useful for code emitted by compilers and DSLs. It&#x2
388.
by tikhonj 3y ago
I'm such a fan of the debugging book[1] recommended in the article that I bought a bunch of copies to give out. I've given copies to friends, interns, data scientists and even executives, and everybody who's read it has appre
389.
by tikhonj 3y ago
Big companies—and even established mid-sized companies—have the room and the motivation to hire people for long-term considerations. At that scale, some low % chance that a new hire will not do anything immediately is just part of the cost
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by tikhonj 3y ago
Pretty much anybody involved in the product, growth and leadership teams at any of those companies?

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