tikhonj

11 ms·

121.
by tikhonj 7mo ago
The practical upside is that it makes using higher-order functions much smoother, with less distracting visual noise. In Haskell this comes up all over the place. It's somewhat nice for "basic" cases (`map (encode UTF8) lines
122.
by tikhonj 7mo ago
In a non-strict language without side-effects, having a function with no arguments does not make sense. Haskell doesn't even let you do that. You can write a function that takes a single throw-away argument (eg 0 vs \ () -> 0) and,
123.
by tikhonj 7mo ago
They've been gamed in the "study for the test" sense for years —a sort of human over-fitting—but managers did not mind. I've heard some insist that this is a feature, not a bug. (Depending on levels of cynicism, it&#x27
124.
by tikhonj 7mo ago
> in what sense is make_string_comparator_for_locale "really" a function which takes a locale and a string and returns a function from string to ordering? In the sense that "make_string_comparator" is not a useful
125.
by tikhonj 7mo ago
None of the changes in the comment make owning a car impossible, they just make driving marginally less privileged over walking and biking.
126.
by tikhonj 7mo ago
The rule of 3 is awful because it focuses on the wrong thing. If two instances of the same logic represent the same concept, they should be shared. If 10 instances of the same logic represent unrelated concepts, they should be duplicated. T
127.
by tikhonj 7mo ago
Worth pointing out a success story: all ACM publications have gone open access starting this year[1]. Papers are now going to be CC licensed, with either the very open CC-BY[2] license or the pretty restrictive (but still better than nothin
128.
by tikhonj 8mo ago
> you can't spec out something you have no clue how to build Ideally—and at least somewhat in practice—a specification language is as much a tool for design as it is for correctness. Writing the specification lets you explore th
129.
by tikhonj 8mo ago
3- Anthropic looks "woke" and the administration cares more about perceptions than reality. Not too different from picking on Harvard/etc.
130.
by tikhonj 8mo ago
I mean, look at all the startups that succeeded despite being complete shitshows behind the scenes... the baseline for leadership, organization, coordination or, hell, execution for a startup to succeed isn't exactly high either.
131.
by tikhonj 8mo ago
Living with ADHD also increases your chances of getting into a car accident substantially. I can't find the numbers now, but the increase is non-trivial and there are some clear mechanisms (inattention, impulsivity and risk-seeking beh
132.
by tikhonj 8mo ago
There's a lot of area on the spectrum between where we are today and "sugary beverages are all banned". For example, Starbucks could limit the sizes it sells and advertises—you'd still be able to have as much sugar as yo
133.
by tikhonj 8mo ago
It's not inevitable, it's just poor leadership. I've seen changes at large organizations take without being crudely pushed top-down and you'd better believe I've seen top-down initiatives fail, so "performance
134.
by tikhonj 9mo ago
> crystal clear software development plan and the exact know-how to implement it This is simply not how expert programmers work. Programming is planning, and programming languages are surprisingly good planning tools . But, of cours
135.
by tikhonj 9mo ago
Efficiency isn't even the best way to optimize for (expected) shareholder returns for an organization! Efficiency fundamentally trades-off against adaptability and resilience.
136.
by tikhonj 9mo ago
A major part of what makes somebody "the best" is tacit knowledge . This is the sort of skill and "know-how" you can build up from experience and one-on-one instruction, but cannot easily be captured in text. For progra
137.
by tikhonj 9mo ago
It's also pretty clearly a deterrence against people admitting and fixing their own mistakes, both individually and as institutions. Which is exactly what we're seeing here...
138.
by tikhonj 9mo ago
A sense of art and whimsy and experimentation is less compelling when it's jumping on the hypest of hype-trains. I'd love to see more folk art in programming, but Gas Town is closer to fucking Beeple than anything charming.
139.
by tikhonj 9mo ago
Fossil-fuel cars a good analogy because, for all their raw power and capability, living in a polluted, car-dominated world sucks . The problem with modern AI has more to do with modernism than with AI.
140.
by tikhonj 9mo ago
I've realized it's a different paradigm in (very loosely) the Kuhn sense. You wouldn't track tasks if you're fundamentally not even thinking of the work in terms of tasks! (You might still want a bug tracker to track re
141.
by tikhonj 9mo ago
A lot of highly performing teams don't even use tickets.
142.
by tikhonj 9mo ago
I think the trick with Haskell is that you can write types in such a way that the APIs that get generated are idiomatic and designed well. The implementations of individual functions might be messy or awkward, but as long as those functions
143.
by tikhonj 9mo ago
From what I've heard—and in my own very limited experiments—LLMs are much better at less popular languages than I would have expected. I've had good results with OCaml, and I've talked to people who've had good results
144.
by tikhonj 9mo ago
GitHub has at least some support for org-mode rendering. Which is a good reminder that a lot of this stuff really doesn't have to be a stark either-or choice—a lot of standardization isn't inevitable or natural or necessary, but
145.
by tikhonj 10mo ago
what I've done is avoid the sort of boss who would mandate AI use in a past job I did tell a boss that I wasn't going to be doing the whole tickets/estimates/schedule tetris thing, and that actually worked out... because
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by tikhonj 10mo ago
most organizations have awful leadership, sure but that doesn't mean you can't (or shouldn't) work around it
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by tikhonj 10mo ago
Different programming languages come with different schools of thought about programming and different communities of practice around programming. If you take a group of people who are squarely in the enterprise Java school of thought a
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by tikhonj 10mo ago
If you're doing something forgettable, what makes you think the workaday Java or Python programmer would find it innately motivating? Alternately, if you have the sort of work or culture that taps into people's intrinsic motivatio
149.
by tikhonj 10mo ago
> In the end the best will win on the merits. The last six decades of commercial programming don't exactly bear this out... The real lesson is that writing software is such a useful, high-leverage activity that even absolutely awful
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by tikhonj 10mo ago
Caring about craft in programming is more like a photographer caring about light and composition and creativity and taste than a photographer caring about equipment.

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