skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I enjoy writing my own code more than I enjoy reading other people's code which is probably not right.

Right or wrong, I think this is true for most programmers. Would be interesting to understand why this is so. Probably related to the problem in the article: we're writing code that is too clever, so reading it takes too long or is too mentally taxing. If we could read code as fast as we read text, it would be less annoying.
Look at win 11 too. The ads and news shit. How outlook has to open edge until one day it pops up an option not to but begs you not to take the option. The telemetry. The need for an MS account to install it (or find a workaround not to).
How about banning that boring meme too?

You know "considered harmful considered harmful"

and complaining about "considered harmful" whenever "considered harmful" post appears?
> clever code is art to be studied and enjoyed.

Cool, great, save it for the Obfuscated C contest. The less time I spend “studying” someone else’s idea of cleverness while trying to fix ticket #51483 or implement some weird business logic corner case the happier I am.
The fun, intellectually stimulating part definitely takes a back seat in priority over keeping the lights on for customers/colleagues most of the time, except in personal/weekend projects.
> the slots are regulated and everybody sets them at exactly the legal limit.

It's unlikely there is any slot machine in Nevada "at the legal limit." Every gaming device must be set to theoretically pay out a minimum of 75% of wagers -- i.e. the maximum it may keep (or "hold") is 25%. This is, of course, a theoretical number, on any given day a particular machine may hold more, or it may have negative hold -- just like if you flipped a coin enough times, occasionally you'd get long streaks of heads or of tails, even though theoretically it should be 50/50.

In reality slot machines are typically configured to hold between 6 and 15%. A slot machine holding 25% would be an awful experience and simply not get repeat play. Slot manufacturers prepare each game with a range of options that the casino can choose from, but none of them would deliberately ruin their own game by offering a 25% hold option on a slot machine.

Nevada Gaming Control Act Regulation 14: 14.040 Minimum standards for gaming devices. 1. All gaming devices must: (a) Theoretically pay out a mathematically demonstrable percentage of all amounts wagered, which must not be less than 75 percent for each wager available for play on the device.

https://gaming.nv.gov/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=1...
> any kind of metaprogramming whatsoever

I am personally on the fence about this one. It's tremendously useful when writing code, and I've done quite a fair share of it myself; but on the other hand, when you are reading the code, trying to understand what the hell is actually being called and why, it really sucks when your F12 bottoms out at some meta-generic piece of machinery that invokes something when called from somewhere but what and where, exactly, is a mystery that requires a global search over the repo in the best case (in the worst case there is either nothing to search on or the search term will turn up thousands of hits).
You're mostly right. The problem I experienced is, that those people managing the old machine spec the new to lowly, because the prices are high. The optimize like before: for them and not the users.

The result is not just added latency, but actually slower build times etc. compared to your local laptop, not to speak about a high-performance PC.
It isn't, but the sad state of affairs is that if it exist it will be abused.

... yes, and welcome to this thread which is about alternatives that tries to avoid that.
I don't think most people would describe almost anything you wrote as clever. I hope that's not insulting...

Metaprogramming tho... You want to make a magic black box that takes hours to debug and conceals real bugs, invest heavily in metaprogramming to save a hundred lines of code that can be maintained with three find and replaces/SED calls and a recompile a year... Most metaprogramming shouldn't exist in production code.

Programming is social. You have to weigh your decisions heavily by who you work with now and who you might work with in the future. If you work in a niche language or toolset you might think "this is my chance to do whatever I want!" But the reality is, it should be the complete opposite.

Most compilers make clever code silly. You can write a 15 line hard to read pipe or method chain, or a 25 line double for loop with the same runtime characteristics. The latter is always better to maintain, while the former is always more clever. One is good for the team the other for someone's self esteem.
You describe an appeal to accomplishment fallacy. Whether or not someone has done x or y themselves has no bearing on whether your code has quality issues.
s/harmful/irrelevant/

By the line, most code and tests will be written by AI in the next few years, with humans specifying it, checking it and checking the overall results.

The next generation will look back and ask, "you wrote code BY HAND ?" the same way 99% of us look back and ask "you wrote assembly code BY HAND ?" (and by the numbers, 99% of us don't manage memory by hand, either)
Astronomical Hoaxes Throughout the Ages
And what Linux Distros are not rock solid? Never had a problem with the OS part of the equation.
Good feedback is a gift. And by good I mean excluding whining and bullying. The latter two are noise in the feedback channel.
Thanks for the detailed answer.

I wonder if there will be a rise in controller-friendly alternative stores for steamdeck after this decision.
Yes, a lot is in flux. Just now I bumped into https://wasix.org which I have yet to figure out how it (will) fit(s).
Thank you for your reply.

I prefer reading documentation or technical deep dives - such as this one

https://mattwarren.org/2017/02/07/The-68-things-the-CLR-does...

Is code more dense than English? Why do I understand more overall from this blog post than I would if I studied the codebase of the CLR for hours and hours.

I think it's to do with mental models. If developers were on all the same page of understanding the underlying mental models, we could all understand eachother's code because we all understood the same underlying things.
My view: good code is necessarily boring code.
This is my favourite 10+ hour video on youtube! Quite a hit with others, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm3YgoEiEDc
The ham radio enthusiasts preping for disaster
I read this article and wanted to weep.
Just to clarify a bit, well educated !== well informed. Along the same lines, could a lack of flouride be taking (at least some of) the blame for a high sugar diet?

At the very least, there should be provisions for those who want to opt out. For example, discounted filtration systems.
Interesting case!

You can see it is R/r local revolutions of the small circle. Then you need to add one global revolution from going around the large circle. So R/r + 1.

This is of course what the article is saying pretty much.

Are there other situations that require a similar reasoning?
Who cares about taxes when you can print money?
I do seriously occasionally play videos to keep my device awake - local mkvs on repeat though, not the consuming internet bandwidth type. Usually when leaving some janky update apps (hi Garmin) that really need to keep working for hours and don't care about keeping the PC awake. When twiddling with sleep settings I sometimes don't set them up right and playing a video in VLC always works.
When did "clever" become synonymous with "overcomplicated"?

To me, clever code is maintainable code. If you can't understand code, either it is not maintainable, or you don't master the language at the required level.

The thing is that it depends. "Ternary operators are too hard" is not an absolute truth. I would argue that sometimes they are more readable, sometimes not. Same for recursion and everything. The art is to find the balance, and even there, there is not one universal truth.

If my interns need to learn things, that's not a problem for me. The goal is not for the interns or my grandmother to maintain my code. The idea is that the maintainers maintain it. If they find it maintainable, then it's hard to argue that it is not.
"ChorizoGate: an Accidental Hoax" - https://telescoper.blog/2022/08/03/chorizogate-an-accidental...
I see you also use some minor code from planetiler :)

How is baremaps different to it? Does baremaps also work without PostgreSQL? Or is PostgreSQL required and then it does support real time updates or similar? How long does a planet-wide import take (for vector tiles) and how much RAM does it require?
I wonder when it first started because I remember https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhk7lDnTjAg from nine years ago.
Visualizing control flow from if ladder effort: minimal

Doing the same for not tiny boolean expression: way more

Just because you think it is cool cuz profs forced it on ya during college is not a argument
I keep seeing "if (some_boolean == true)" and it kind of grates on me.
> if you use const I'll assume you write in an immutable style

Why make assumptions that don’t make sense in the language you’re using?
My high school computing exam (by government direction - VCE, graduated 2019) was filled with many such

If a And b Then
Return True
Else
Return False
End If

programs. Not sure why they were so scared of Return a And b. Apparently they got a new curriculum after I graduated; my teacher was very happy about it but I didn't get to see it myself.
If a code reviewer pulls that on you, meet with them and explain why that's asinine. If that fails bring in someone more senior as a tie breaker. If that fails, find somewhere else to work...
An acquaintance of mine works with a builder that specializes in zero energy homes. They mostly build in a climate similar to the UK. The houses are insanely insulated and airtight, but they have an air exchange unit that cycles fresh air in through a heat exchanger so the house temperature stays steady.

These houses are honestly quite pleasant to be in. The insulation has the side effect of being very good noise dampening as well. I was talking to the owners of one and they said they'd never used the backup electric heater. The one time things got a little cold they light a candle in their bedroom and everything was fine.

So I think in temperate climates, the answer is air tightness and thermal control, not whole house fans.
Doesn't it make any sport that involves straining horses deeply immoral? Basically you raise those animals to risk their lives daily. You could just throw them to the wolves instead and bet on whether they escape.
All of quantum computing is done with strictly reversible logic. But this is not a reduction of power. The Toffoli gate is an example of a reversible 3-bit logic gate that is universal. You can transform any classical circuit into a reversible one using this gate.

The trick? You have some input/output wires in your circuit that start with initial value 0 or 1, and some that end up in a 'garbage' state. You don't care about what they end up with, they strictly exist to maintain reversibility.

As an concrete example, the binary operator a OR b is not reversible - it destroys information. But if we make it a three-in three-out operator f(a, b, c) -> (a, b, c XOR (a OR b)), then it is reversible. Here f is it's own inverse, because applying it twice you'd end up with c XOR (a or b) XOR (a or b) = c.

Yet if you start with c in an initial 0 state, you can now compute the binary OR of two variables a, b in a reversible manner.
I don't know if it's intrinsically qualify as clever but point free programming in haskell can get really hard to understand really fast.
Thanks - that alone is a good example to help illustrate what it can do, appreciate it!
I am not certain how it works in all of Europe, but it doesn't seem straightforward in Sweden or UK.

In US and Japan, they will rather do the full roster of tests than transfer in radiology results from another hospital. Its not something to do with costs, but physician opinions. Every specialist has his personalized view of the patient in hand - so the corpus of information he needs is different.
That is interesting - as you can tell I only had a shallow knowledge of it. I'll read more about how it works. Thanks!
I leave the fun to my side projects. There I write overly clever code and play with the language.

Some of these ideas end up in production if I can find a way to make them less clever-looking and more approachable.

When I was younger I wrote fun code in production. Then I had to extend it or debug it some years later and struggled to figure out what was going on. Invariably ended up rewriting it to plain code, often many lines more but with clear intent and little ambiguity.
Free Workout Builder
Hello Hacker News,

I've been a long-time reader but never posted anything before.

I got tired of gym apps so built my own. Smart Strength aims to make it easy to record and add videos to each set of your exercise then you can share it directly with your friend or personal trainer for feedback.

Features include:
- Personal exercise library
- ability to add videos and comments to each set
- personal url with all your workouts
- respect for your privacy

However, I also don't like downloading different ones to try it out so I added a page where people can try before they sign up. The iOS app has a slightly different workout builder interface.

The app is with on Ruby on Rails and uses the hotwire approach. The app uses Turbo Native with one Swiftui screen for workouts.

Would love some feedback.
It fits the level of computer expertise I expect from a general YouTube commenter, and I suspect there's a string of replies to the comment telling them there's a better way to do it and that subthread has reached Godwin's law.
What were Workers offering until now without basic tcp network io?
The merit of the code quality issues is in question based on the authoritativeness of the person doing the criticising.

I don't like the pride, superiority and smugness that comes from criticizing code and the assumption that they're the ones in the right because of their criticism, rather than the expertise of the one who wrote the code and solved the problem and did the work.

I've noticed people pay more attention to the stones that people throw rather than those throwing them.

Edit: In other words, criticism is cheap if you have no skin in the game.

I don't think it's a fallacy, it's like hosting a wedding and inviting a guest and then being criticised for the entertainment on offer. People pay attention to the criticism, not that the criticism is coming from a guest and that their criticism is not as valuable coming from the guest than the people paying for and tastes of those hosting the wedding.

Whether or not the code quality issues are true or not, their importance is dependent and weight of someone's criticism is not that high as everyone thinks.
Writing code in a way that it can be understood by coworkers is a prerequisite for collaboration.
Really good article. It is refreshing to see not all content created today has to be in a video format or if written is split into 30 pages.
The Quran, away from the religion it self, its authenticity is out of this world, not even gpg can do anything near it.
Who answers the "book a call" on https://ahrefs.com/enterprise if not a sales person?
All 3.5" floppy drives shipped with the Commodore Amigas were capable of using 84 tracks in total, though AmigaDOS and AmigaOS' low-level libraries limit themselves to just 80 tracks. Some games and other software made use of extra tracks (usually 81 or 82) for both copy protection schemes and to squeeze in a bit more data per disk, without any known reliability issues.
3.5 mm to 3.5 mm cable with decent length would be nice to have if you need to hook up a laptop/phone to speakers.
A spare PC power cord and a figure 8 cable would also be nice. I've seen many cheap cables that caused sparks because of a bad plug. One millimeter off and computer shuts off.

One Philips PH02 screwdriver if you ever need to clean a PC or change SSD, memory, etc.

For the software: for Windows side you can use Hiren's BootCD (you can use USB drive despite it's name). It doesn't contain pirated software as Sergei Strelec WinPE.

As for Linux - well, you can use Ubuntu's Live USB/DVD to be able to get a running system in minutes to recover files or do other stuff.
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult."
I don't see the Raspberry Pi going anywhere anytime soon. It has a massive community and excellent Linux support I'm sure it will popular for a while. The problem as I see it is, cost and availability. If I can get a x86 based mini PC for less than a Raspberry Pi, then I'm going to do that. I'm not going to buy other sbcs though because everyone I've seen using them has just had a headache getting the thing to work and keeping it up to date (not mainlined kernel)
As far as I know, in Sweden data about a patient is shared between every hospital... you need to sign up on a web portal, of course, but from then on, you can authorize a doctor or nurse anywhere to get your data with a click... you can go to any clinic and they have access to your full history. It's impossible to do anything properly if you don't have that. I just don't understand why in the US, it's acceptable for hospitals to be silo-ed like that to the detriment of everyone's health.

Here's a news report from 2017, when the system was being set up: https://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j2069

Today, this has been working for years.
>I don't think most people would describe almost anything you wrote as clever. I hope that's not insulting...

I desperately wish I could say this, but I have seen it happen
It's more about guard clauses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guard_(computer_science)
In many languages it's necessary if it's a nullable boolean...
Pretty much the truth, isn't it? The other strand of this thinking is from Taleb: wealth leads to degrees, not the other way round. That could perhaps qualify as a hot take.

What did you learn at university that you actually use on the job, in the form that is usable on the job?

I did a tiny bit of programming, but I couldn't code properly until I was working. I could do calculus, but you don't actually use that as a derivatives trader, you just internalize a few results and that's it. I coded up a model that needed a Bessel function once, but that was a small project. Generally you don't solve new equations every day at work (you apply the same ones over and over), but somehow that's what you do at uni.

I don't think I learned anything at uni that I needed at work, in academic terms. I'm pretty sure I could have just jumped straight to working after high school. My first boss didn't do uni and he did just fine.

Uni was maturation, and the last chance to see a few of the wonders of human knowledge. Materials, electromagnetism, computation, fluids, structures, and so on. But really just a tour of those things. None of these things is what you do at work, where the real skill is grinding, networking, and understanding how some business works.
> Using "clever" as a criticism is implicitly an ad personam argument, passing value judgement on the person who wrote it ("Oh, they must have written it to show off") instead of an argument about the code itself.

I don't know how you got this conclusion.

I can see judgement being passed to the code with respect to not just who wrote it, but also who's going to need to understand it later, who's going to need to make changes to it. In that sense, calling code "too clever" makes sense, right?

There's hyper-specific reasons why you'd need code that's going to be complex/too clever for that group, esp if it saves cost or is faster than the simpler alternatives, but in most cases there's nothing that justifies it.
Pretty sure 99% of the world agrees with you here. If someone wants to write twenty nested closures that compose some category theoretic construct in some ancient academic paper instead of two function calls using an already imported library they can go to their museum or whatever to be studied. The rest of us have shit to do...
I repeat Djikstra's refrain: asking whether a computer can think is like asking whether a submarine can swim.
The Content a Kenyan Worker Had to See While Training ChatGPT
There's also this excellent article from Scientific American: Passive cooling systems in Iranian architecture, by Mehdi N Bahadori, February 1978

"They have no energy sources other than the sun and wind, and yet they circulate cool air through buildings and traditionally provided cold water and ice for the hot summer of the country's arid regions"

https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerica...
Think I'd rather work for honest thieves.
Star Trek engine sounds, anyone?
http requests, js execution and a kv store. Actually very useful. You can run many stuffs there from simple webhooks to full CMS
what are the implications of this if this trend continues?
> The hard thing is solving complex problems with simple code.

If you agree that code is a way of communicating with people (not machines), then this is a corrolary of my rule: that if you truly understand a complex matter, then you can explain it in simple language to a reasonably intelligent non-expert.
I think you are proving the authors point quite well.

Composing music to be performed if very different than sharing the composition of it with many composers.

There is meter and scale and notation but only so many ways you can express things with the most complex being complicated meter. Now performing that - yes - more complexity but not in the composition.

We dont need programmers to "perform" in every CRUD app on the internet. We arent all writing game engines, gpu drivers, etc etc.

There are Beethovens out there doing things that require phenomenal skills (that can be learned) but its not 1:1 with composing music with performers limits in mind when the composer didnt HAVE to collaborate.
Making code simple is not easy.

In your analogy I think the listener should be the junior programmer. Music by Beethoven can be appreciated by many more than just the people who can compose on that level.

In the same way you can write code so that also junior developers can appreciate it. The challenge lies in clearly expressing solutions to complex problems.
You can certainly view it from different perspectives, e.g. people are happier than estimated or people estimate lower than actual happiness. So your point is valid as well. As for readability - it took me a while to get it too so I agree.
It's the difference between "some human labor involved" and "zero". Getting to zero is very hard, and has very different ramifications then the "some" quantity.

As long as "some" labor is needed, then that's going to be the entire economy - it'll simply expand along whatever constraint that "some" represents.

The bizarre thing lately is all these arguments people make implying the economy is maximized. That all the things that will ever be needed are currently being produced and no new growth is possible or will ever happen (despite this literally never being the case in the entire history of the human race).
I think reservations were not at all about the needle (except perhaps for the strange guidance about not aspirating to check for potential blood vessel puncture without explanation).
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Where? It says that world average in 2006 was 5.52 and in 2022 it was 5.29. That is clearly a downward movement.
> fuck off to hell

Yeah, that's the button I was looking for.