tikhonj

12 ms·

181.
by tikhonj 1y ago
There's a classic Peter Naur paper about this from 1985: "Programming as Theory Building" https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf
182.
by tikhonj 1y ago
I mean, you can provide support and structure without imposing it or telling people what to do. People who need the structure can rely on it; people who don't can work their own way. Top-down, controlling management vs unstructured c
183.
by tikhonj 1y ago
If you enjoyed that, I have a blog post on generating mazes in Haskell (from over a decade ago!). The algorithm is very similar, but the code is written using "inductive graphs" and the post is really more of an intro to working w
184.
by tikhonj 1y ago
There are still counterexamples. Nobody's commoditized Gurobi or k/qdb, and nobody will. But these companies won't ever become household names because they're not driven to grow and build a monopoly at all costs, they&#x
185.
by tikhonj 1y ago
If we really had AGI, the first one-person billion dollar company would be some secretive prop trading operation spun up by some experienced trader.
186.
by tikhonj 1y ago
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, etc, etc.
187.
by tikhonj 1y ago
I've known folks who used Emacs for writing and org-mode, but didn't live in it otherwise. But living in Emacs is more the sort of thing you get to do, not the sort of thing you'd need to do ;)
188.
by tikhonj 1y ago
Fun story: when I interned at Jane Street, they gave out worksheets full of put-call parity calculations to do in your head because, when you're trading, being able to do that sort of calculation at a glance is far faster and more flui
189.
by tikhonj 1y ago
Can't speak for anyone else, but for me, AI/LLMs have been firmly in the "nice but forgettable" camp. Like, sometimes it's marginally more convenient to use an LLM than to do a proper web search or to figure out how
190.
by tikhonj 1y ago
One more thing: when I've been in analogous situations, one of the difficulties I had was managing my own emotions. I'm still not especially good at that. But one thing that helped me was taking some concrete action to change th
191.
by tikhonj 1y ago
> I need to continue delivering at the same capacity with a significantly scaled-down team. I'd start by thinking through how much of that "need" is real . What is driving the things your team "needs" to accom
192.
by tikhonj 1y ago
Oh, I remember this used to happen in Berkeley. Not sure if it stopped, or if I just stopped walking outside late enough to see it :P It totally makes sense as an approach. No point in having normal traffic light cycles on low-traffic stree
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by tikhonj 1y ago
At some point, Groupon was the fastest growing company ever.
194.
by tikhonj 1y ago
Using a different algorithm is a change in what you're doing, not how you're doing it, so I'd see that as qualitatively different from writing bad code.
195.
by tikhonj 1y ago
I mean, it's pretty strong evidence that they value good code. You don't get quality by accident. (But you do get it by habit!) But, in another sense, they didn't "prioritize" good code because it isn't really
196.
by tikhonj 1y ago
> For example, if you’re making a game for a 24-hour game jam, you probably don’t want to prioritize clean code. That would be a waste of time! Who really cares if your code is elegant and bug-free? Having worked on some 24-hour game j
197.
by tikhonj 1y ago
If you start with lambda calculus you don't have effects in the first place, so there's nothing to eliminate. Lambda calculus and friends are perfectly reasonable languages for computation in the sense of calculation . A better w
198.
by tikhonj 1y ago
Functional programming à la Haskell has always been about making effects controllable, explicit first-class citizens of the language. A language entirely without effects would only be useful for calculation. The talk about "purity&quot
199.
by tikhonj 1y ago
I have a commercial microwave with exactly one dial[1]. It's great. It's more expensive than a "normal" microwave, but the UI is great, the construction is really solid and it's easy to clean. There's no extern
200.
by tikhonj 1y ago
Those are all just decisions the companies made. For future games, the game developers and the companies licensing IP can simply make different decisions. If a large market like the EU creates strong incentives for them, they will make di
201.
by tikhonj 1y ago
I remember seeing somebody summarize this as "SaaS is a pricing model" or "SaaS is financialization" and it totally rings true. Compared to normal software pricing, a subscription gives you predictable recurring revenue
202.
by tikhonj 1y ago
Okay, but I've also heard insiders at companies I've worked completely overlook obvious problems and cultural/management shortcomings issues. "Oh, we don't have a low-trust environment, it's just growing pains.
203.
by tikhonj 1y ago
Something I found really annoying in the Avro spec is that they automatically convert between ints/longs and floats/doubles in their backwards compatibility system. That just seemed like an unforced error to me. (Maybe it's c
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Writing Code to Be Read at a Glance(jelv.is)
3 points by tikhonj 1y ago|0 comments
205.
by tikhonj 1y ago
At some point, I did a rough count, and the number of operators you encounter in "normal" Haskell code—avoiding lens or domain-specific libraries—was pretty close to the number of operators you'd encounter in, say, JavaScript
206.
by tikhonj 1y ago
What makes it hard to parse? The lack of parentheses? The way HashMap Nat Nat is a bit verbose and not clear at a glance? Something else?
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by tikhonj 1y ago
A problem I've seen in programming too: understanding and articulating the value of quality is necessary but nowhere near sufficient for actually doing good work! So you end up with folks who've gotten past the initial hurdle—de
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by tikhonj 1y ago
If you have a strong team, you don't have to "enforce" quality. And if you think that quality is "obsessing over standards and guidelines" we're definitely operating in categorically different paradigms.
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by tikhonj 1y ago
Writing high-quality code lets you get more done faster, with less people. It's not just art for art's sake! That's what drives me crazy about this: you can just be better, it isn't even a tradeoff, but most managers cho
210.
by tikhonj 1y ago
The highest-agency, highest-ownership team I worked on was at Target of all places. (To be fair, it was not a typical team for the company!) The VP who made that work learned that style of leadership from a decade in Strats at Goldman. Both

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