tikhonj

26 ms·

391.
by tikhonj 3y ago
Yeah, my sister works at a nonprofit foundation and it sounds like an absolute disaster in terms of awful culture and management :/ I would naively expect non-profits to have more humanizing cultures internally but it's just objec
392.
by tikhonj 3y ago
It's a definition. I suppose definitions are tautologies by definition though :) And yeah, the real insight is not the definition but the fact that tacit knowledge is inevitable and important, and that trying to eliminate it will be ac
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by tikhonj 3y ago
Tacit knowledge is inevitable... but it's also different from what this article is about. Tacit knowledge is the kind of knowledge (and skill!) that cannot be fully explained or taught in words—think mechanical skills you can only pick
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by tikhonj 3y ago
The article started by talking about UAW negotiations—it's about "employees that have to move muscles". Not that it matters. "We shouldn't try to improve things for one set of people if things are bad for a differ
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by tikhonj 3y ago
There's a massive difference between "productive" and "urgent". I've worked on teams that were constantly in a hurry, I've worked on teams that got a lot done, and there's been basically no overlap be
396.
by tikhonj 3y ago
Are you saying there is no such thing as clearer or less clear writing in natural languages or programming languages? It's 100% subjective and depends entirely on the reader?
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by tikhonj 3y ago
0 is always going to be a special case for division in real numbers. But how we handle that special case is a matter of convention.
398.
by tikhonj 3y ago
The worst part is that they are both, in a critical sense, wrong. There is no absolute 100% universal "right" answer to how division works—it's just a matter of convention! Merely getting into the argument of whether 1&#x2F
399.
by tikhonj 3y ago
I figure the preference in syntax is a trade-off between how hard it is to learn and how hard it is to read day-to-day. More regular and verbose syntax is easier to learn, but requires more actual reading when you use it. More concise but
400.
by tikhonj 3y ago
The Emacs version of this is using ^L (the ASCII form feed character), which lets you jump around using Emacs's built in page navigation commands. I've used this occasionally in Emacs Lisp code and it's pretty nice, but I&#x2
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by tikhonj 3y ago
The problem is that real-world domains—or even just relatively complex software domains—do not decompose perfectly into 100% self-contained units. It's not even a limitation of any given programming language (although those limitatio
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by tikhonj 3y ago
I try to organize most of my code as libraries too, but I still find having sections and subsections super useful. I sort of took that for granted because most of my code was in Haskell, and the Haskell documentation tool supports section
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by tikhonj 3y ago
Sometimes the most effective way to work with a person is to work around them. Always resorting to that isn't mature or professional, but neither is not recognizing when that's the best option.
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by tikhonj 3y ago
That's true, but the flip side is selecting heavily for public commentary from people who are already invested in—or at least generally open to—the tool in question. But, of course, that means selecting heavily against the people who s
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by tikhonj 3y ago
It's pretty easy if you use NixOS :) That's been one of the somewhat unexpected benefits for me with NixOS: it's so easy to pull in tools and libraries that I don't have to worry about using less popular options.
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by tikhonj 3y ago
"RTFM" is not a coherent defense for awful API design and we shouldn't accept it as such.
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by tikhonj 3y ago
> Doing chores and being productive are antithetic. Creative, high-leverage work like programming isn't a linear function of hours-in-chair. If working from home lets you focus better and be more creative, you can absolutely be bo
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by tikhonj 3y ago
Residents of small administrative districts carefully designed to segregate by social class (and, implicitly, race) do not want to new construction. Residents who live slightly farther away do. Since housing prices and construction have a s
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by tikhonj 3y ago
A lot of my absolutely favorite books are rated below 4.0. A few examples: 1. White Noise at 3.86 2. Catch-22 at 3.99 3. Dhalgren at 3.77 4. At Swim-Two-Birds at 3.86 5. Midnight's Children at 3.98 6. Омон Ра at 3.90 7. Ne
410.
by tikhonj 3y ago
If you actually had reproducible builds, the build date would not tell you anything about how out of date the software is—you would only need the date of the source code the binary was built from. By definition, the binary you'd get
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by tikhonj 3y ago
The Unison language does roughly what you're talking about: https://www.unison-lang.org/ The language is built with this idea from the ground up, so it can move functions around between machines robustly and without ru
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by tikhonj 3y ago
I figure that Go is to C what Java was to C++. Between that and Go's background as a big company tool designed for big company work, the tendency towards Javafication should come as no surprise.
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by tikhonj 3y ago
I figure it's because they're trying to sound corporate, because that's just how people imagine "official" communications have to sound. Clear, simple writing would be too casual! It's possible to write cor
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by tikhonj 3y ago
You can, just like you could do in Markdown. You can use inline TeX and get the right overall format with a template. I haven't actually done this for a paper, but I used Pandoc to typeset a textbook with lots of math and code and it w
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by tikhonj 3y ago
The Nix language uses whitespace in lists and I'm not the biggest fan—it works well when list elements are simple expressions (individual identifiers, numbers... etc) but gets awkward and confusing if you want to have more complex expr
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by tikhonj 3y ago
Humans have evolved to communicate based on some sort of shared mental model and shared intentionality—human speech generally has some sort of more-or-less coherent semantics by its very nature . While it's hard to reason about what g
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by tikhonj 3y ago
C is boring in the same way that weaving through traffic at full speed on a motorcycle is boring—people have been doing it forever and some of them haven't even gotten hurt by it...
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by tikhonj 3y ago
"Boring" inevitably means "popular" in these discussions—"popular" in the sense of "mainstream" and "widely used" rather than "trendy" or "hyped", but it's still a p
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by tikhonj 3y ago
Another "use popular tech because it's popular" article dressed up as engineering wisdom. "Nobody gets fired for choosing IBM" isn't supposed to be aspirational! The most effective organizations I've seen
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by tikhonj 3y ago
I have mixed feelings on this advice. On the one hand, it's not fair to criticize volunteer maintainers too harshly. On the other hand, the same person would probably see forking + marketing a fork as an attack—maybe not in the case of

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