rjha · HackerTrans

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I was talking to a software engineer friend for making a demo. This was supposed to be a quick demo and I had sent him 3-4 wireframes. Then I rang and asked causally, "how long will this take?". He said, check back in the afternoon. sure enough, he delivered a full functioning demo in the afternoon. His starting point was my wireframes fed to claude. Wireframes to a working demo in an afternoon. Life has changed, for good or for bad!

rjha

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

This was covered on HN a while back, https://alvis.care/

rjha

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I have never been an apple fanboy. Till 2022, I was on android phones. Work issued either Thinkpad or XPS variants. However, I have owned apple books since 2004 starting from panther era. I sincerely believe that apple provides best features and performance combination in the given price for laptops.

Here I feel that I-hate-apple crowd is just stuck with this notion of luxury overpriced brand when it is clearly not the case. Apple has superior hardware at better price points. Last time I was doing shopping for a laptop, I could get similar features only at a 30% - 40% price premium in other brands.

I am typing this on an apple M2 air and try finding similar performance under 2000 USD in other brands. The responsiveness, the (mostly) sane defaults and superior rendering and fonts make it worth it. The OS does not matter so much as it used to do in 2004 and the fact that I have a unix terminal in 2024 is just incidental. I have turned off auto updates and I do not use much of phone integration apart from taking backups and photo copying.

I switched to an iPhone in 2022 from a 200 US$ Samsung handset. Here, I would say that not everyone needs an iPhone. My old phone used to do all the tricks I need on this one. However, the camera is really and photos are really great. If I buy an iPhone next time, it would be just for the photos it takes.

rjha

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I am not sure why the author thinks that DEBUG level is about debugging your code before putting it in production. The real use of DEBUG is in production when one day the roof is caving in and the normal logs do not have information for you to figure it out.

Especially when the deployment is not under your control. That is when you ask to enable DEBUG so system can spew more information and you can trace the execution better.

OTOH, this whole idea of attaching trace-id (Android) and where the log came from (modules and functions) is nothing new. on the whole, I am not sure what the takeaway is.

rjha

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

Thanks a ton for sharing this. I have a kid in middle school and cannot wait to work few problems with him.

rjha

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

formatting the above function for better readability

``` func toUpperCase(s: string) <IMPLEMENTATION>

  a = "hello world" 
  echo toUpperCase(a) 
  # HELLO WORLD 
  echo a.toUpperCase 
  # HELLO WORLD 
  echo toUpperCase a 
  # HELLO WORLD 
  echo a.toUpperCase
  # HELLO WORLD ```

rjha

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

I have used both Arduino boards and our own hardware layer with AVR toolchains. The main USP of Arduino was a good community (people like and easy-to-follow instructions. The target market of Arduino did not want to look inside the IDE. That is the reason they scored over PIC etc. because they never even talked registers.

However, this easy was slapped together in the most unprofessional ways imaginable. IIRC, the SD card code used to have C++ virtual functions when a rock solid library from Chan was available. It was not easy built on a solid core that provided a gradual path to professional setups. It was do-it-and-happy-when-it-works kind of setup.

So I am not sure what direction can they take it in with funding. There is a limit on where easy can take you in the Embedded world, especially if you are looking for reliability and performance.

rjha

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

markwhen.com can be useful for people who are looking to generate Gnatt charts and do not want to wrestle with excel. There can be many such use cases like a quick plot, a quick pivot table, a quick Gnatt chart, A fancy looking table for pre-sales guys & proposal writers to render them as part of the proposal. You should aim this tool at people making lot of proposal PPT.

rjha

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

Any guess for the company?

rjha

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

This is an echo of Stroustrup argument that other nice languages have no user. Sure Java enterprise beans was whacky but saying it got no scrutiny is inaccurate. It got lot of scrutiny and criticism and that is why it moved into the direction of POJO from EJB madness. Things have become better in that land.

Javascript is not getting hate because it is now famous so people are jealous and are hurling non-sensical abuses. The problem many of us see is that Javascript is famous, a critical piece of tooling and Javascript evangelists are still working in the teenager I-will-just-type-it-again mode.

By now, things should have progressed to a stage where doing simple things was simple.

rjha

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

if this is simple, then what exactly is complicated? To a guy new to programming, ref(1), ref(false), mount(x), import { $1} , from {@x} are all hard concepts to grasp. I can give pass to async and await for being baked in the language.

Today, Java considers the canonical Hello world example to be too complicated because of static main() and System.out.println() and introducing changes to make it easy to write first programs.

I do not know what kool-aid cool kids in Javascript front end world are drinking.

rjha

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

is zeromq still relevant? https://github.com/nanomsg/nng

rjha

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

* The increase in complexity is unavoidable as well as accidental (creep due to marketing). Some of it is necessary to address the increased sophistication of the web. Just compare what we can do today to what we used to do in 1996 with cgi and perl.

* It is not that native GUI libraries like Qt or SDL or GTK are super easy. GUI are event driven and composed and need to be in sync with the user wishes and as such have a programming model that is different from a top to down execution of instructions.

* The biggest challenge with the current state of front end development though is that there are no standards and no stability on a YoY basis. What I learned to do with PHP in 2005 is still valid. I can still use those tricks and whip something useful. What I learned to do with tables in mysql 3.x is still useful with mysql 8.x. However the world of Javascript frameworks is one of shifting sand.

What I learned with Javascript framework X.1 will be obsoleted by X.2 and will be obsoleted by X.3. No guarantees for time investment is challenge #1. angular 1.x -> 2.x, Vue 2.x -> 3.x are some examples that come to mind. Think of all the wasted effort. That is the killer. Humans are good at making peace with whatever crap is thrown at them. I do not think technology is the reason here. It has more to do with hype cycles and trying to catch developer's attention in a competitive market with new buzzwords.

* There is a lack of simple tools like what visual basic used to do. Sure, everything is async and we are in an event driven world but frameworks could have provided a common core to enable simple use cases. bootstrap library is a case in point. I can get decent results with bootstrap without knowing the intricacies of css. However I am hard pressed to find a suitable Javascript framework.

rjha

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

+1 for "The Goal" - This book is so timeless!

rjha

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

LoL :) we should have a __how you boost your monitor to the right height thread __ I use Mckusik's freebsd book, Brooks computer architecture, Myth and meaning by Levi-Strauss. The last one is for calibration only.

rjha

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

Hi Tim, can you provide some resources + links?

rjha

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

I think the criticism hurled at PHP is misplaced. It serves the niche it was designed for very well. As long as you have namespaces, the include files should not be a problem for you. You can design a class loader and use that. The only thing you need to tell php.ini is an include path and then rest of the configuration is app dependent, like it is for any platform. Where do you find VM config for modules?

Also, any language that is used in real life is built on a foundation of sh*t only. The component loading with python is so bad that I have programs keeping their own version of python and IDE suggesting I create VM for my project. The situation with C is so bad that no one can solve my linker problems unless I switch the toolchain version. For a long time Javascript was a (purpose built) toy language to sprinkle pixie dust on web pages. Any sufficiently complex problem requires either deep knowledge or following convention (tribal knowledge specific to the context)

rjha

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

>incredible savings of not having to track and sign documents True that. The technical debates on HN on miss the point of why people feel the need to use DocuSign. If only two parties are involved, I will print, put my signature and send the scan. This is what I will do despite having a DocuSign account.

multi party agreements and especially the ones where you are the one needing others signatures (e.g. share holder agreement) and DocuSign are a match made in the heaven. It can send reminders to parties, show you who to nudge and let you download the final version. Compare that to print and put signature workflow.

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