hackthemack

5 ms·

91.
by hackthemack 11mo ago
I guess I just never encounter code like this in the big enterprise code bases I have had to weed through. Question. If you want to do one email for expired users and another for non expired users and another email for users that somehow ha
92.
by hackthemack 11mo ago
It has been so long since I worked on the code that had chaining functions and caused problems that I am not sure I can do justice to describing the problems. I vaguely remember the problem was one function returned a very structured array
93.
by hackthemack 11mo ago
Yeah. I did not mention what I would do, but what you wrote is pretty much what I prefer. I guess nobody likes it these days because it is old procedural style.
94.
by hackthemack 11mo ago
I never liked encountering code that chains functions calls together like this email.bulkSend(generateExpiryEmails(getExpiredUsers(db.getUsers(), Date.now()))); Many times, it has confused my co-workers when an error creeps in in regards to
95.
Casey Muratori interview, math education failures and switching away from OOP [video](youtube.com)
2 points by hackthemack 11mo ago|0 comments
96.
by hackthemack 11mo ago
For anyone curious, the draw a circle code in Circle.asm appears to use Bresenham's circle drawing algorithm. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/c/bresenhams-circle-drawing-al... The secret is to draw 1 arc of a 45 deg
97.
by hackthemack 11mo ago
I feel like this was known years ago, but never gained traction. Here is a 2022 article in wired about bots. https://www.wired.com/story/bots-online-advertising/ And before that, in the 2010s, an employee of ebay
98.
by hackthemack 11mo ago
QuickJS is amazing. You can put in javascript code, run it through QuickJS and make little binary utilities to run on their own. Someone took QuickJS and put it in wasm so you can run QuickJS in the browser or in node. https://gi
99.
by hackthemack 11mo ago
I remember a Doctor Who episode where he said, paraphrasing, "You never get credit for the crisis you prevented before it happened". Sort of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
100.
by hackthemack 11mo ago
I find the use of "illegible" in the title weird myself. To my mind, the word they should use is Intangible.
101.
by hackthemack 11mo ago
The content of the article about how do you measure software talent hit home with me. I am not saying I am some x10 developer, but all the metrics used at the companies I worked at just do not capture what makes a good software developer em
102.
The illegible nature of software development talent(surfingcomplexity.blog)
181 points by hackthemack 11mo ago|130 comments
103.
by hackthemack 1y ago
Yeah. I think if I were to pick one reason, it would be Lua is "minimalist". But, like I wrote, maybe, it too, would have just had lots of stuff added onto it if it had been in the browser. Hard to say. I love ++, but you know wha
104.
by hackthemack 1y ago
I agree mostly in that Lua and Javascript are both similar, and like I said in my post above, I could see myself saying the exact opposite if Lua had been included in the browser. The things I do not like about Javascript can easily be shot
105.
by hackthemack 1y ago
I was thinking a while back, how nice it would be if lua was the scripting language in the browser instead of javascript. There are some projects to compile lua to wasm and have it run in the browser... https://pluto-lang.org&#x2
106.
by hackthemack 1y ago
You bring up an interesting point. This is something I discovered years ago when I would have "political discussion lunch" with three of my friends who all had very different political views. After years of going to lunch together
107.
by hackthemack 1y ago
I worked at a mom and pop ISP in the 90s. Lucent did seem at the forefront of internet equipment at the time. We used Portmaster 3s to handle dial up connections. We also looked into very early wireless technology from Lucent. Something I w
108.
by hackthemack 1y ago
I was curious about the drone footage mentioned in the article. Here is a link to a video of a fly over. https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/news/world%E2%80%99s-tallest...
109.
by hackthemack 1y ago
Programming is such a strange field with so many people with different mental models. I am no fan of Perl, but I think having a function pass arguments as copies (and then also having semantics to work on the original by reference if you wa
110.
by hackthemack 1y ago
I do not know what to make of this comment. It is so much of what you see on social media that derails constructive conversation. There is nothing terribly wrong with the comment but it feels adjacent to low effort. To make your point, you
111.
by hackthemack 1y ago
Some discussion pre-announcement from yesterday with 60 comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45400478
112.
Reports: EA set to be sold to private investors for up to $50B(arstechnica.com)
75 points by hackthemack 1y ago|62 comments
113.
by hackthemack 1y ago
I was pondering similar thoughts. Will LLM assistants ossify our current programming languages? My limited testing seems to show LLM assistants do well the more popular the language is (more data in its training), so is the hurdle for adopt
114.
by hackthemack 1y ago
Reminds me of every time I run npm install. Before that, reminds me of when people talked about monkey patching RoR. Seems like the general trend in programming since the beginning, when asked "Cheap, Fast, Good", the winners are
115.
by hackthemack 1y ago
As an aside, I worked on fixing computers way back when. Somewhere along the line (maybe late 80s, early 90s) Compaq started using these cheap aluminum screws to hold together the computer case and hard drive mounts and motherboard to the c
116.
by hackthemack 1y ago
If you want to watch a documentary about the forming of Compaq and its rise, Silicon Cowboys is not bad. Trailer is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wjJYqUkHd8 You can watch the documentary on Tubi https://tubitv
117.
by hackthemack 1y ago
In the 90s, when I used various text editors like Ultraedit, Nedit, Pico, Nano, Vi, and my co-workers used Dreamweaver, Visual C++, Visual Basic, NetBeans I was in the "TABs are superior" camp but only for the initial indention of
118.
by hackthemack 1y ago
Similar experience. I would be the one the entire team would turn to when a really hard problem to debug came up. Yet, when I would say that OOP is not great and is over-complicating the code, I would be scoffed at. I never could reconcile
119.
by hackthemack 1y ago
"It's more in favor of the employee than a lot of people admit." But is it equal? It is hard to scientifically to prove, but it sure seems like companies have way more leverage than a lone developer. I am not trying to antago
120.
by hackthemack 1y ago
"There is not a single problem competent developers have that unions would solve" Question for you about this. Is the balance of power in negotiation equal between a lone developer and a company? I ask, because in my little world,

More ›