danmur (u/danmur) - Readit News

danmur commented on YAML document from hell (2023) ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023... · Posted by u/agvxov

twelvechairs · 3 months ago

Almost all of this is solved by basically putting quotes around strings.

Yaml has its uses cases where you want things json doesnt do like recursion or anchors/aliases/tags. Or at least it has had - perhaps cue/dhall/hcl solves things better. Jsonnet is another. I havent tried enough to test how much better they are.

danmur · 3 months ago

Jsonnet is pretty nice but the library support isn't quite as good. There are some nice libraries for yaml that do round trip processing for example so you can modify a yaml programmatically and keep comments. Yaml certainly has some warts (and a few things that are just frankly moronic) but it deserves some credit for hitting the sweet spot in a bunch of ways.

danmur commented on Tesla Wants Out of the Car Business theatlantic.com/technolog... · Posted by u/fortran77

webdevver · 3 months ago

manual driving is clearly, sooner or later, going out the door. getting from A to B has been getting commodified and the notion of a "car" is rapidly moving towards "private bus".

elon can see this direction. whoever invents self-driving cars first, will kill cars as we know it, completely. so it makes sense then, that if anyone should invent what kills tesla, it should be tesla.

alot of elon hate on hn but he is making objectively very good bets. he doesn't have a pr department like the other guys do (who direct their entire wardrobe, body language, gestures, do speech coaching, etc.), and i suppose we can say that the pr guys are vindicated! zuck, gates, cook, all rehabilitated their public image no-problem.

danmur · 3 months ago

I wonder if it will ever be practical or economical to have humans and machines driving together on the roads we have now though. Maybe we'll skip that step and go to robot-only roads with more stuff built into the actual roads.

On Musk, he doesn't need PR so much as to keep his mouth shut for a while and try and deliver on some of his BS instead of spouting more.

danmur commented on Monodraw monodraw.helftone.com/... · Posted by u/mafro

larodi · 4 months ago

This at least 10th post of Monodraw on hn

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8433417 - oct 09 2014

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9545252 - may 14 2015

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27832910 - july 14 2021

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32134469 - july 18 2022

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39651796 - march 9 2024

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45037904 - 1 year ago

and the some

all of these gained interest, so my conclusion is Monodraw benefits a lot from being regularly exposed to HN crowd.

danmur · 4 months ago

It's very effective. Both times I've wanted to give them my money. But mac only, geeze

danmur commented on Show HN: I vibecoded a 35k LoC recipe app recipeninja.ai... · Posted by u/tomblomfield

tomblomfield · 9 months ago

Hands-free voice control and being able to access recipe ingredients and steps without 5 pages of SEO-optimised prose.

danmur · 9 months ago

They just haven't done the "now monitise it" step in the vibe-coding journey.

danmur commented on One Drive in Toyota's $10k Pickup Will Make You Want One (2023) motor1.com/reviews/696031... · Posted by u/walterbell

akimbostrawman · 9 months ago

They would need to pay me 10k to integrate any microsoft software into my car....

danmur · 9 months ago

Blue windscreen of death you say

danmur commented on Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life livescience.com/animals/g... · Posted by u/wglb

adrian_b · 9 months ago

When classifying living beings, a single classification criterion is not good enough.

One classification criterion is descendance from a common ancestor, i.e. cladistic classification.

In many cases this is the most useful classification criterion, because the living beings grouped in a class defined by having a common ancestor share a lot of characteristics inherited from their common ancestor, so when using a name that is applied to that class of living beings, the name provides a lot of information about any member.

However there are at least 2 reasons which complicate such a cladistic classification.

One is that the graph of the evolution of living beings is not strictly a tree, because there are hybridization events that merge branches.

Sometimes the branches that are merged are closely related, e.g. between different species of felids, so they do not change the overall aspect of the tree. However there are also merges between extremely distant branches, like the symbiosis event between some blue-green alga (Cyanobacteria) and some unicellular eukaryote, which has created the ancestors of all eukaryotes that are oxygenic phototrophs, including the green plants.

Moreover, there have been additional symbiosis events that have merged additional eukaryote branches and which have created the ancestors of other eukaryote phototrophs, e.g. the ancestor of brown algae.

After any such hybridization event, there is the question how you should classify the descendants of the hybrid ancestor, as belonging to one branch or to the other branch that have been merged.

For some purposes it is more useful to classify all eukaryote phototrophs based on the branch that has provided the main nucleus of the hybrid cell, and this is the most frequently used classification.

For other purposes it is more useful to group together all the living beings that are oxygenic phototrophs, including various kinds of eukaryotes and also the blue-green algae, and divide them based on the evolution tree of their light-capturing organelles, i.e. the chloroplasts.

This is also a valid cladistic classification, because all oxygenic phototrophs, both eukaryotes and prokaryotes, are the descendants of a single common ancestor, some ancient phototrophic bacteria that has switched from oxidizing manganese using light energy, to oxidizing water, which releases free dioxygen.

Even when there are no branch merges due to hybridization, there remains the problem that in the set of descendants from a single ancestor there are some that are conservative, so they still resemble a lot with their ancestor, and some that are progressive, which may have changed a lot, so they no longer resemble with their ancestor.

In this case, using the name of the entire group provides very little information, because most characteristics that were valid for the ancestor may be completely inapplicable to the subgroups that have become different. In such a case, defining and using a name for the paraphiletic set of subgroups that remains after excluding the subgroups that have evolved divergently may be more useful in practice than using only names based on a cladistic classification. For instance the use of the word "fish" with its traditional paraphiletic meaning, i.e. "vertebrate that is not a tetrapod", is very useful and including tetrapods in "fishes" is stupid, because that would make "fish" and "vertebrate" synonymous and it would require the frequent use of the expression "fishes that are not tetrapods", whenever something is said that is correct only for vertebrates that are not tetrapods, or of the expression "bony fishes that are not tetrapods", for things valid for bony fishes, but not for tetrapods.

While in many contexts it is very useful to know that both fungi and animals are opisthokonts, and there are a few facts that apply to all opisthokonts, regardless whether they are fungi, animals or other opisthokonts more closely related to fungi or more closely related to animals, the number of cases when it is much more important to distinguish fungi from animals is much greater than the number of cases when their common ancestry is relevant.

Animals are multicellular eukaryotes that have retained the primitive lifestyle of the eukaryotes, i.e. feeding by ingesting other living beings, which is made possible by cell motility.

Fungi are multicellular eukaryotes that have abandoned the primitive lifestyle of the eukaryotes, and which have reverted to a lifestyle similar to that of heterotrophic bacteria, just with a different topology of the interface between cells and environment (i.e. with a branched multicellular mycelium instead of multiple small separate cells).

This change in lifestyle has been caused by the transition to a terrestrial life, which has been accomplished with a thick cell wall (of chitin) for avoiding dehydration, which has suppressed cell motility, making impossible the ingestion of other living beings, the same as for bacteria. Moreover the transition to a bacterial lifestyle has also been enabled by several lateral gene transfers from some bacteria, which have provided some additional metabolic pathways that enable fungi to survive when feeding with simpler substances than required by most eukaryotes, including animals.

So even from a cladistic point of view, fungi have some additional bacterial ancestors for their DNA, besides the common opisthokont ancestor that they share with the animals.

Animals are unique among eukaryotes, because all other multicellular eukaryotes have abandoned the primitive lifestyle of eukaryotes, by taking the lifestyles of either heterotrophic or phototrophic bacteria. However for both other kinds of lifestyle changes there are multiple examples, i.e. besides true fungi that are opisthokonts there are several other groups of fungous eukaryotes that are not opisthokonts, the best known being the Oomycetes. There are also bacteria with fungal lifestyle and topology, e.g. actinomycetes a.k.a. Actinobacteria.

If we will ever explore other planets with life, those living beings will not have a common ancestor with the living beings from our planet, but nevertheless it will still be possible to classify them based on their lifestyle in about a half of dozen groups that would be analogous to animals (multicellular living beings that feed by ingestion, so they must be mobile or they must have at least some mobile parts), fungi (multicellular beings that grow into their food, absorbing it after external digestion), oxygenic phototrophs, anoxygenic phototrophs, chemoautotrophs, unicellular equivalents of animals and fungi, like protozoa and heterotrophic bacteria, viruses.

These differences in lifestyles are more important in most contexts than the descendance from a common ancestor.

So while it is useful to have the name Opisthokonta for the contexts where fungi and animals and their close relatives must be included, it is much more frequent to need to speak separately about fungi and other fungous organisms on one hand, and animals on the other hand.

I agree that the term "kingdom" is obsolete when used in the context of a cladistic classification of the living beings.

Perhaps it should be retained for a non-cladistic classification of the living beings, based on the few fundamental lifestyles that are possible, and which would remain valid even for extraterrestrial living beings.

danmur · 9 months ago

Glad to see diamond inheritance being a problem in other fields

danmur commented on The role of developer skills in agentic coding martinfowler.com/articles... · Posted by u/BerislavLopac

cheevly · 9 months ago

Literally all of this is easy to solve if you actually tried. Developers are literally too lazy to write their own AI tooling, it’s bizarre to me.

danmur · 9 months ago

The goal isn't to use AI, though, it's to be productive. Maybe for you AI + writing support tools to improve your workflow makes you more productive and that's great! For me, for the kind of work I'm currently doing, I'm more productive in other ways.

danmur commented on The role of developer skills in agentic coding martinfowler.com/articles... · Posted by u/BerislavLopac

AndyNemmity · 9 months ago

Why not just split the tasks, and have different projects only house a portion of the code?

danmur · 9 months ago

Why dumb down your work worse because the machine can't understand it?

danmur commented on Dear hosters, you are selling wood, not furniture berthub.eu/articles/posts... · Posted by u/zdw

danmur · 9 months ago

> From the perspective of the traditional server business, such a developer is unfortunately often seen as rather helpless—someone who needs assistance with everything, can’t run their own database, and has no idea what a nameserver is.

Developers who have no idea about how things work (like nameservers and databases) are pretty helpless generally, regardless of whether they call themselves cloud-native developers or not.

danmur commented on GIMP 3.0 testing.gimp.org/news/202... · Posted by u/wicket

bhouston · 9 months ago

These 4 features are AI related but each of them have separate strong use cases. Looking at popular commercial tools like Adobe Photoshop and Topaz tools for inspiration is just logical -- it means there is clear demand for these features among users.

danmur · 9 months ago

That isn't always true, there's plenty of times where companies push features that users don't want. No Chrome users have been clamouring for more ads and more invasive tracking, for example.