tikhonj

44 ms·

631.
by tikhonj 5y ago
I saw a cool study recently (summarized well here[1]) with an empirical experiment on how well code coverage predicts how well a test suite catches bugs. They found that the number of test cases correlated well with the test suite's
632.
by tikhonj 5y ago
That's roughly how I've seen experienced people work on high-performance code. I mean, they rarely maintain the generated assembly directly , but they do write code with the assembly it would generate in mind, and keeping the c
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by tikhonj 5y ago
> Going into an Apple store and asking for (and buying) the computer that comes in the smallest box, which I had a good reason to want at the time This seems fine, but I've found a better approach in this sort of situation is to—a
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by tikhonj 5y ago
I started out just using Nix for development on Fedora and macOS, with home-manager coming later. Was a good way to get into Nix without taking the full NixOS plunge.
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by tikhonj 5y ago
It sounds like you're saying that work can't be collaborative without people interrupting each other with no warning, but that isn't my experience at all—my experience has been that the most collaborative work happens when
636.
by tikhonj 5y ago
That's exactly how I use Nix—I have a repo that can reproducibly build the same NixOS setup across my machines, and I can even share a large chunk of the config with my work Macbook. Once I got over the hump with Nix, I found it easier
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by tikhonj 5y ago
You know, I haven't thought much about this. I use a lot of third-party packages and have a lot of my own custom code, but things almost never interfere. In the few cases that crop up (for example, awkward interactions between org-mo
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by tikhonj 5y ago
That's true in principle. In practice, I've seen Emacs undergo non-trivial changes and yet none of my personal Elisp code has ever broken. I'm not sure how that happens—perhaps the core abstractions are sufficiently simple th
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by tikhonj 5y ago
You can order the "DIY Edition" without an OS pre-installed, as well as a lot of other customization. https://frame.work/products/laptop-diy-edition/configuration...
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by tikhonj 5y ago
It's a better solution for dependency management specifically . I need to go to bed so I can't go in too much depth, but here's a high-level summary: - Nix packages can compose in arbitrary ways, containers can't - Ni
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by tikhonj 5y ago
One thing I like with Nix is that it can build containers, so it's totally compatible with deployment systems that require containers. I don't mean using Nix commands in a Dockerfile, I mean having a Nix derivation that produces
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by tikhonj 5y ago
It's interesting how inconsistent and asymmetric these intuitive limits seem to be. Pushing employees to work extra hours, easily $X000 in time? Perfectly acceptable. Abusive JIRA-powered micromanagement? That's just how it is. Bu
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by tikhonj 5y ago
The problem with proving things about software is less in the proof itself and more in the connection between the proof and the real world. If somebody told me that they had a financial system whose security was based on applying the Pythag
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by tikhonj 5y ago
It doesn't have to be perfect, sure, but it would have to be a lot better to be "a new foundation for AI"—exactly what the article (and presumably this discussion) is about.
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by tikhonj 5y ago
My experience is that all my code gets thrown away or rewritten at some point. I've seen what code that doesn't get rewritten looks like; I'm intent on never inflicting anything like that on the world. As far as types go, I
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by tikhonj 5y ago
The US cities hit by the housing crisis—with the notable exception of New York—are disproportionately dominated by single-family homes, enforced through explicit zoning laws. Being "some of the densest places in the US" does not
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by tikhonj 5y ago
Mandatory fees are rent-seeking either way, it's just possible that imposing the rent is justified. Off-hand, I'm not convinced. I'm leaning more and more against systems designed to prevent free riders—our culture is so prim
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by tikhonj 5y ago
In my experience "boring" means "popular"—usually in the "you wouldn't get fired for choosing IBM" sense[1]. But somehow "use popular technologies even if they're bad" is not a convincing th
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by tikhonj 5y ago
I worked at Target on both projects using Haskell and projects using a "standard" tech stack, and we found recruiting Haskell developers a lot easier than other languages. People actively want to work in Haskell! Using a less co
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by tikhonj 5y ago
I've ready maybe a third of the books on the list and enjoyed most of them, but few felt particularly great , and some left me feeling pretty meh . Nick Harkaway's Gnomon is by far the best science fiction book I've read
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by tikhonj 5y ago
The problem with this viewpoint is that the baseline is pretty arbitrary. Using a newtype carries a conceptual cost of wrapping and unwrapping... but using u8 directly carries the conceptual cost of remembering what any given u8 means! What
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by tikhonj 5y ago
Businesses—in the guise of mediocre managers—absolutely invent arbitrary deadlines as a mechanism of control . If the deadline were real , it would have context, engineers could use that context to adjust the scope and design of what they
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by tikhonj 5y ago
Seems like Electron would make a stronger foundation than native toolkits for Emacs-style flexibility, extensibility and composition. The DOM, for all its faults, charts a solid path between being flexible and still being structured ,
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by tikhonj 5y ago
Have you tried the new native compilation system? I haven't worked on LaTeX documents specifically, but I did see a noticeable improvement in responsiveness across the board and a massive improvement in Elisp-heavy functionality like
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by tikhonj 5y ago
The problem is that "doing a good job" is rarely the objective at most organizations! People naturally want to do a good job; it's just more interesting and satisfying. But then we have layers of management and process and cu
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by tikhonj 5y ago
> But what if some of these jobs were given to the employees? This seems like another thing Trader Joe's does—I've been to their stores in a few places I've lived, and while they always have a similar aesthetic, a lot of
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by tikhonj 5y ago
There are a lot of ways to compete besides salary, but my experience is that companies paying below-market-rate salaries tend to be less competitive on other axes too—with the exception of fields like research that have no trouble attra
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by tikhonj 5y ago
Memory safety is literally the only relevant topic in this whole thread whose impact isn't "truthy" in that sense! We can measure how many bugs and security vulnerabilities in real projects are memory issues, and we know th
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by tikhonj 5y ago
Yes, it's a function of memory safety. The abstractions C provides for working with memory and the semantics of the language itself are both design choices it makes. Memory safety is one of the few places where we have robust empirical
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by tikhonj 5y ago
> imperative programming is easy to understand by humans It's interesting that you choose C as an example because the absolutely immense numbers of bugs and security vulnerabilities directly due to C should, alone, lead us to ques

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