tikhonj

35 ms·

571.
by tikhonj 4y ago
My experience has been that roles in less popular languages are rare but they also substantially help match up candidates and interesting opportunities. I've been interested in functional programming and Haskell since college and it&#x
572.
by tikhonj 4y ago
And to bureaucratic systems too—governments try to regularize human behavior to make it legible to the state and it can absolutely cause massive harm to people. Seeing like a State makes a great case for this idea; I found it absolutely f
573.
by tikhonj 4y ago
Doesn't it use WebkitGTK, at least on Linux? I expect it has the same problems, but it's less of a problem for developing UIs than for browsing to arbitrary web pages—it might get a bit annoying, but you can always work around t
574.
by tikhonj 4y ago
I've been playing a bit with WebkitGTK for my own development and found the same thing—I was learning how to use SVG and was getting really confused about how transform-origin was supposed to work... then I tried the same SVG in Firefo
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by tikhonj 4y ago
Exactly the same for me: some of my best work and most enjoyable time has been collaborating closely with people. And yet, some of my worst time has been in settings that can also be described as collaborative! What made a differenc
576.
by tikhonj 4y ago
Meh, I think this attitude misses the some of the fundamental social dynamics in the open source world: projects—at least the ones you've heard of—aren't just code, they're communities. People using, or even just talking abo
577.
by tikhonj 4y ago
Jane Street's been doing this for most of their existence. I interned there a decade ago when they had 300 people and maybe 100 engineers and they had already built up an impressive internal infrastructure—including lots of in-house to
578.
by tikhonj 4y ago
I helped with recruiting and interviewing for a Haskell team in the past and, in our case, it was substantially easier to hire for our roles compared to non-Haskell teams in the same company and location (Target in Sunnyvale/remote).
579.
by tikhonj 4y ago
I don't think I've ever seen a large project that wasn't pushing the limits of its language in one way or another—just with popular languages, the language is treated as a given and people jump right to finding workarounds
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by tikhonj 4y ago
I've repeatedly seen both high quality and low quality tooling act as massive force multipliers even for small teams; the question is just which direction you want to multiply. They say an army marches on its stomach—well, a tech effor
581.
by tikhonj 4y ago
I don't know about other industries, but driver's licenses have never come up at all in tech. Treating it as a red flag is obviously facile, but, honestly, no worse than nonsense I have seen in tech hiring... but it's jus
582.
by tikhonj 4y ago
The distinction isn't between functions and values in general, it's between the function being called and the arguments passed to the function being called . The difference isn't in the things themselves, it's in the
583.
by tikhonj 4y ago
Design-wise, Emacs is less an editor with an API and more a set of core editing concepts (buffers, strings with properties... etc) embedded into a flexible language. The core concepts have a native implementation that's hard to change,
584.
by tikhonj 4y ago
First thing I tried was the Haskell Aeson library which keeps the first value of the key: λ> decode f :: Maybe Value Just (Object (fromList [("this_article",String "// would be better")])) There
585.
by tikhonj 4y ago
"Use the popular thing because it is popular." The same industry was—substantially still is!—telling us to use XML everywhere. Let's not.
586.
by tikhonj 4y ago
As far as I can tell, you're relying on non-standard behavior. This is what [the standard][1] has to say about keys being unique: > * The JSON syntax does not impose any restrictions on the strings used as names, does not require th
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by tikhonj 4y ago
> It's so rare, and lovely, when you run into an engineer who can not only figure out how to do the task they're being assigned, but run through the next couple of steps in the future taking the team strengths, company strateg
588.
by tikhonj 4y ago
Hollywood actors are part of a large union (SAG-AFTRA), but individual actors still get compensated orders of magnitude more than the average. What particular aspect of having a union would make that substantially more difficult in tech?
589.
by tikhonj 4y ago
That's what I was paranoid about with wireless mice: what if the battery runs out while I'm in the middle of a competitive, time-sensitive game? With my Logitech mouse, I can plug it in from the front, so it's a minor inconve
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by tikhonj 4y ago
The point is that writing "__builtin_popcount" makes your intentions clearer than implementing popcount as a loop. The guaranteed performance is downstream of the clarity: since the code is more explicit, the compiler doesn&#x27
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by tikhonj 4y ago
That's true, but in any scenario where it mattered, I'd hate to rely on it. Compilers have the idiom recognition pass as a sort of hack for speeding up existing codebases but it's ultimately just a heuristic. When I write cod
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by tikhonj 5y ago
Seems like you could do that in a reasonably thorough way on HN with an ad block filter.
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by tikhonj 5y ago
I use Emacs with Nix, which parses my config for use-package declarations and installs them for me. Emacs packages are pinned the same way as anything else in Nix and, as a bonus, it can also manage non-Emacs dependencies. I wouldn't r
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by tikhonj 5y ago
Why are musicians so obsessed with their instruments? Just use the right tool for the right job, don't call yourself a "pianist" or a "drummer", call yourself a musician .
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by tikhonj 5y ago
> Don't use classes for information. Use regular data structures (dict, list, tuple, set) and use functions to manipulate them. I've written a lot of functionalish Python, and I've found that this is a consistent way to
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by tikhonj 5y ago
> well it's expensive so it should be what I normally eat but better When I went to Chez Panisse for the first time—not Michelin starred, but still well-regarded—I didn't know what to expect. What surprised me was that it wa
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by tikhonj 5y ago
I mean, that's one direction. But we could also give the part-time engineer more autonomy so that they can quickly make decisions on their own. They'll still need to spend time talking to people, but they can figure out an effec
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by tikhonj 5y ago
> the difficulty people have with it is that it’s functional, not that it’s nix. My experience is that the difficulty people have is with Nixpkgs as a library/codebase rather than the language itself. Poor error message, unclear a
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by tikhonj 5y ago
Popularity and quality don't have to be independent for this to be true—it's enough that they're not too heavily correlated, or at least not heavily correlated past some threshold. That does not seem dubious at all!
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by tikhonj 5y ago
Nobody gets fired for choosing IBM, and nobody gets fired for choosing AWS. The corollary that's missing, of course, is that they often should get fired—but popular (sorry, "boring") choices have a momentum of their own.

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