Tarks (u/Tarks) - Readit News

Tarks commented on Cognitive load is what matters github.com/zakirullin/cog... · Posted by u/nromiun

The ability to create code that imposes low cognitive load on others not only is a rare and difficult skill to cultivate- it takes active effort and persistence to do even for someone who already has the ability and motivation. I think fundamentally the developer is computing a mental compression of the core ideas - distilling them to their essence - and then making sure that the code exposes only the minimum essential complexity of those ideas. not easy and rare to see in practice

Tarks · 7 days ago

Plus rarely survives requirements/context changing because most abstractions are leaky.

My favourite frameworks are written by people smart enough to know they're not smart enough to build the eternal perfect abstraction layers and include 'escape hatches' (like getting direct references to html elements in a web UI framework etc) in their approach so you're not screwed when it turns out they didn't have perfect future-sight.

Tarks commented on Rails is better low code than low code radanskoric.com/articles/... · Posted by u/thunderbong

amichal · 9 months ago

Wasn't fintech but was fin something. Several weeks into trying to port a Excel workbook with a zillion tabs, some VBscript from stackoverflow and other nastiness and being unable to replicate the results. I discovered the "consultant" who help them create this insane thing had turned on the "allow circular references"[1] option and choosen a number of iterations that "Seemed to make it work"

Yay! for non-deterministic financial modeling.

Also was really fun trying to explain to the folks who hired me why I couldnt get the results they wanted to see.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/remove-or-allow-a...

Tarks · 9 months ago

ha wow, read about a guy having to clean up after some data scientists that'd figured out how to use circular references and an iteration limit to do crazy, hard to replicate stuff, (thankfully) never ran into it myself but I bet that was a 'fun' time for you !

Here's to hoping we both never have to dip back into that world again :D

Tarks commented on Rails is better low code than low code radanskoric.com/articles/... · Posted by u/thunderbong

qsort · 9 months ago

The second coming of Excel, basically.

Tarks · 9 months ago

Shhhhhhhh.

Do you have any idea how much I made in Fintech converting spreadsheets that'd exceeded the TA's ability to hack/keep it all in their head and/or quit?

Favourite included a single cell that had, I am not kidding, something like 150+ nested if statements.. and there was a dateTime bug in it somewhere :D

A friend did very well positioning himself as a data engineering consultant that could come in and quickly improve poorly thrown together data pipelines, wonder what the equivalent is for these :)

Tarks commented on Relativty: An open-source VR headset for $200 relativty.com/... · Posted by u/LorenDB

chii · 10 months ago

3dof is sufficient, imho, for a large number of VR use cases, because most people don't have a full room dedicated to it, but is at a desk. Sitdown VR setups would be more common, if the equipment was cheaper.

Tarks · 10 months ago

Also have to hard disagree. I remember going from the Oculus DevKit2 to the Vive, seeing the change in people we'd invite over for "I'm done trying to convince you with words just Come over and try out VR" evenings.

6DOF, even when sitting, is a significant difference. Your brain immediately feels far more at home with good 6DOF.

Fun fact : one week I spent about 5-6 hours every evening playing Elite Dangerous in VR. Mining asteroids while listening to lofi cyberpunk and pretending that mining was my whole life, it was great. Until my partner would bop me on the back of the head ^_^

Tarks commented on Ask HN: What would you use to track and update a small companies KPIs? · Posted by u/Tarks

markus_zhang · 2 years ago

If it's a small company I still feel Excel/Google sheet is OKish. How many KPIs and how many teams are we talking here?

Tarks · 2 years ago

About 10 teams, some horizontals like Ops, commercial, design, tech, finance, some product specific KPIs & 2-3 project based teams.

I'm going to need to push to keep the number of KPIs down but 5 per horizontal is reasonable.

Tarks commented on Ask HN: What would you use to track and update a small companies KPIs? · Posted by u/Tarks

anotherhue · 2 years ago

sounds like a standard BI platform. I'd reach for Google Data Studio, others like PowerBI.

No need to re-invent the wheel with your own DB.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerBI/comments/s3o6hi/the_most_in...

Tarks · 2 years ago

ty, not reinventing is the purpose of my post :) I've explored using PowerBI a bit, it doesn't seem to be geared towards extracting the data once it's in PowerBI. I'd want to be able to query the data from other services, for example grafana so that we could set up alerting. There doesn't seem to be a clean way to do this, all I could find was https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/datasets...

Tarks commented on Why I don't miss React: a story about using the platform jackfranklin.co.uk/blog/w... · Posted by u/tomduncalf

ng12 · 3 years ago

> But the web platform isn't perfect, and I suspect most React developers have come across a situation where you’d love to be able to just tweak how your component is being rendered.

Honestly, I haven't. The only potential caveat I can think of is when you have some non-reactive legacy code you want to embed inside a React component... but even then React's escape hatches are more than sufficient.

If you're really worrying about when your component renders or re-renders it's probably because there are other issues with your app.

Tarks · 3 years ago

The escape hatches were one of the first things I used to explain why I initially liked react, called them exactly that too.

"They're smart enough to know they're not smart enough to build perfect abstractions, so they do a great job but leave escape hatches just in case"

Tarks commented on HyperNeRF hypernerf.github.io/... · Posted by u/montyanderson

daenz · 4 years ago

For those of you who may not get this reference, it's from a popular Youtube channel, Two Minute Papers, run by Dr Károly Zsolnai-Fehér that recently featured OP's link https://www.youtube.com/c/K%C3%A1rolyZsolnai/videos

The channel is excellent and I recommend subscribing to it if you like this kind of stuff.

Tarks · 4 years ago

Which is very likely referencing this : https://youtu.be/qu32fBkiHFE

Tarks commented on Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time twitter.com/Rich_Harris/s... · Posted by u/leodriesch

cphoover · 4 years ago

I'm tired of having to learn yet another templating language without a very compelling reason.

Why do I have to learn, what is essentially, a new programming language for each of these frameworks (Angular, Svelte, Vue, React... Do I really need to learn yet another language construct for stuff like `loops`, `if/else`, event handlers...etc.

Why must all of these frameworks re-invent the wheel?

At least with React it is most close to the languages we already have learned, JavaScript, and HTML.

From what I can tell Svelte looks similar handlebars templating with it's own unique syntax variations... I can't count how many different versions of the same thing I've had to relearn again, and again.

Tarks · 4 years ago

Agreed, I thought we were past this with the 4th generation of these frameworks, this is like knockoutjs all over again.

The moment the penny dropped for me was when I read something like this about React:

"We realised that inventing our own Yet Another Binding Language that was less expressive than javascript was harder and worse than doing the work to put the relatively simple HTML constructs into Javascript"