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_slyo
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- I once posted a nascent open-source project to reddit and it got shredded, but someone pointed me to some prior art. I studied the suggested materials, and thanks to that feedback my project was eventually successful. Now even CERN uses it in some LHCb software.
ShowHN needs comments like Paul's. Tact and expertise never come equally in the same package. We should appreciate this and grow some thicker skin in the meantime.
- Boost.STLInterfaces provides a more modern alternative to iterator_facade.
https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_75_0/doc/html/stl_interface...
- Wow, this is the first time I've seen the computed goto extension. Delightfully gross!
- I agree that CNN and Fox are both disgustingly biased.
I appreciate BBC's journalistic standards, but I think they are the exception rather than the norm. I think Poland's case is more typical:
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/04/951063118/polands-government-...
Whether privately or publicly owned, the mitigation of media bias requires constant effort, education, and integrity.
- jQuery is fantastic. I am not a web programmer by trade, but I can always get busy with jQuery and just a couple of Google searches.
Last weekend I was trying to find new car dealerships in my region that carried a particular model of car that I'm interested in. They had a dealer search page that could return all dealerships within 250 miles, and they had an inventory search page that had hardcoded the 3 nearest dealership IDs into the URL. But they had no GUI to search all the cars for all the dealers in my region.
I poked around at the elements on the dealership search page, cobbled together a jQuery one-liner to dump all the dealership IDs in my region, and pasted those into the URL to finally see every individual car in my region of the model I wanted. The page took quite a while to load, so probably have have some DoS vulnerabilities to deal with, but at least I was happy.
Vanilla javascript would have been so much more cumbersome!
- Templates are the killer feature of C++. They add incredible power to the language, but also dramatically increase its complexity. Templates are only superficially similar to generics in C#/Java. They are essentially a type-safe, Turing-complete, syntactically-constrained macro system deeply embedded into the grammar of the language.
Few other programming languages offer a similar feature. C++ pulled it off with an ISO standard and multiple conformant implementations.
Templates are loved by many, but they are a contender (along with UB) for the most hated C++ feature due to complexity.
- > You'll have to search very long to find a C++ game code-base that uses boost, game devs are not that stupid ;)
Boost has over 160 libraries and counting. I wouldn't recommend every one of them (some have wacky interfaces, slow compile times, and/or experimental designs), but many of them are excellent, and I don't think it's very difficult to tell them apart.
Regardless, I find your insinuation that Boost users are "stupid" to be extraordinarily uncharitable to library users and developers.
- Are you aware of std::reference_wrapper? https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/utility/functional/referen...
- Hey, this sounds awesome! Thanks for sharing. Please consider putting all this info in the GitHub readme, it's useful for anyone who wants to pick up the project. Also please consider posting this on relevant mailing lists.
I updated my PopOS packages today. My touchpad accel changed, my two-finger scroll broke, and I am left with a bunch of debugging to do and an urge to switch to Guix full-time. I came back to this HN thread and was delighted to find your post.
- Example: https://www.ruralsourcing.com
- I spent a couple weeks casually studying about both, and finally hitched my wagon to Guix. The careful separation of free and non-free software is incredibly refreshing. I appreciate the emphasis on building packages from source. The docs are great and so is the Guile language.
It didn't take me long to get a bootable USB with proprietary drivers and mainline kernel, even though I thought this would be much more difficult.
- Very cool. I have dreamed of building something similar. I would be interested in these modifications:
1. Change living/non-living distinction of food to two different dimensions, shared by living and non living food alike: * Composition - arbitrary bits to match against a consuming organism's diet * Defense - arbitrary bits to match against consuming organism's capabilities, might be a function of energy level for living food
2. Organisms leave behind waste as part of eating and/or moving. Waste left behind is food for other organisms
This might allow for the rise of symbiosis and multicellular organisms
- I imagine you sometimes have reservations about whether to make a moderation decision public, like the one in this thread, but seeing these judgements is always a reminder of how the moderation here is a huge part of what makes this site a special place, regardless of whether I happen to agree with the decision at hand. Thanks for your transparency and good faith.
- I had to Google "sick system", which led me to this insightful post. Well worth the read.
- > Your C/C++ programmers are likely not as well-trained as you think they are.
> The list of people who can write C/C++ correctly, under pressure, and then keep it correct under maintenance, is very short.
I see this assertion with increasing frequency lately. What if this list is not really as short as you think it is? People have been writing and maintaining massive C and C++ codebases all over the world for decades. These are wildly _successful_ languages.
Rust is a great language, and I'm happy to witness its rise in popularity.
If I'm being completely honest with myself, I love C++ for its razor's edge. Every piece of code can be _interesting_ (but normally shouldn't be, of course). The line between brilliance and insanity is fine, and exhilarating.
Is good software necessarily boring? Probably. Would the world be a better place if C++ were replaced with Rust tomorrow? Probably.
If I'm already competent in the exciting language, and there are plenty of places willing to pay me to write it, why should I switch to the boring language? Am I the only one who feels this way?
Maybe I should go learn Perl.
- Software engineering is all about trade-offs and making sure stakeholders are fully informed thereof. Pressure to deliver is one of the most challenging problems an engineer can face, because it stands in opposition to every ideal. Yet it's about as normal as death and taxes.
Haskell sounds amazing. I would be thrilled to learn it, and I hope the ecosystem flourishes. I hope there will eventually be millions of jobs to write code in the language. I'm a little bit envious of those who speak fluently about monads and set theory, and I've learned a lot from brushing shoulders with those people.
Meanwhile, I'll continue solving real-world, extremely stateful problems in an as-purely-functional-as-I-deem-convenient manner with the tools I already have under my belt. You can pry my precious semicolons from my cold, dead, carpal-tunnelled hands.
- This is a really well-organized dive into something that, based on the title, I didn't expect to find much value in. I was wrong.
Learning git was painful. It felt like an obstacle that periodically stood between me and getting my work done. Gradually, I fell in love with the tool, but until now I never really stopped to think about how my git workflow has evolved. Turns out, it still has room for improvement.
- > Like what are you validating that your tests aren't? Why aren't your tests validating it?
I use use a debugger fairly regularly when I'm writing tests. Debuggers are for moments of incredulity. When a test doesn't behave as I expect, I go back and look at my code. I'll look back and forth, and if I still don't see the root cause, then I'll fire go up gdb instead of adding print statements. Debugging a unit test is often way faster than recompiling.
- My grandfather believes that video games are a "scourge" for young men today. I used to think he was old-fashioned for believing this, but I have come around to agreeing with him.
I wasted a large chunk of my life on Counterstrike, Arma 3, DayZ Mod, PUBG, and countless console games. _Thousands_ of hours in total. For me, games were more than an escape or simply a way to unwind. For me, they were a well-hidden addiction. They were an obstacle to reaching my potential. I can't see myself going back to games again and still being as happy as I am now.
I miss games sometimes -- I still occasionally watch them on Twitch or YouTube -- but quitting cold turkey over a year ago has been one of the best decisions I ever made. That I didn't give them up 10 years earlier is a source of great regret.
I'm probably not going to ban my children from playing games they buy with their own money, but I'll definitely have plenty of long talks with them about the dangers of gaming.
I've missed out on a great deal of money hoarding cash instead of stocks, but I have peace of mind. The cost of inflation is worth that to me. I have felt that a crash -- a real crash, i.e. a change in public opinion about the equity markets -- has been just around the corner since 2016. I'm much less worried about the prospect of a dollar crash, even with today's inflation.
This is not investment advice and is only my personal opinion.