darrenf (u/darrenf) - Readit News

darrenf commented on I wasted years of my life in crypto twitter.com/kenchangh/sta... · Posted by u/Anon84

SirMaster · 10 days ago

So it was dumb of me to buy my bitcoins back when they were less than $100 a coin just in the slim chance that it completely blew up? I don't see what was dumb about a decision to put less than $1000 into 10 coins just in case. Worked out really well for me in the end and a less than $1000 gamble doesn't seem like that crazy of a gamble, at least to me.

darrenf · 10 days ago

I shoved £500 down in Sept 2017 knowing full well it was a gamble, and still have a roughtly £500 balance now -- having skimmed enough off the top over the years to buy a couple of iPhones and whatever else. I 100% consider this profit to be literal dumb luck.

darrenf commented on Perl's decline was cultural beatworm.co.uk/blog/compu... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

writtiewrat · 11 days ago

How popular was/is monkeypatching in Perl?

darrenf · 11 days ago

Very. I use `Test::MockModule` (not just in tests) or `Sub::Override` or `Class::Method::Modifiers` a lot, according to convention/style or as I see appropriate — but there are, of course, tons more ways to do it.

darrenf commented on Perl's decline was cultural beatworm.co.uk/blog/compu... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

darrenf · 12 days ago

> [TIMTOWTDI] literally means 'there is more than one way to do it in Perl' - and you can perhaps infer from that that there's little to no reason to do it using anything else

Not my experience at all, FWIW. For me, and the vast majority of Perl devs I’ve worked with over the past 30 years, TIMTOWTDI absolutely means some of the “ways to do it” don’t involve Perl, and that’s not only OK but expected. Of course Perl isn’t the be all/end all. It’s a lot of fun though!

(I’m a majority Perl coder to this day, it’s my favourite language by far. Hell, I even find it readable and easy/fun to debug)

darrenf commented on Google unkills JPEG XL? tonisagrista.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/speckx

lsecondario · 17 days ago

Another one I've noticed is using "I've" as a contraction in e.g. "I've a meeting to attend". Seems totally reasonable but for some reason native speakers just don't use it that way.

darrenf · 16 days ago

Wait, what? Englishman in my 50s here and I use phrases like that all the time — “I’ll be missing standup cos I’ve a GP appointment”, “leaving at lunchtime as I’ve a train to catch”, “gotta dash, I’ve chores to do”. No one’s ever said I sound German!

darrenf commented on Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg ziglang.org/news/migratin... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

carlmr · 21 days ago

They are blasting the product tbf. The people part is a small part of it. And apparently at least distracting the HN Community from their point.

darrenf · 21 days ago

Which is exactly why to cut it out. If you put salt in my cup of tea, I’m gonna notice and it’s gonna ruin the drink.

darrenf commented on Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world axios.com/2025/11/24/jaka... · Posted by u/skx001

bogota69 · 23 days ago

Bangkok is not what you described. Bangkok is a great city, not too polluted, there are not a lot of poor people. Bangkok is like Manila.

I spent a lot of time working is South East Asia. Jakarta is the worst city, yes it is big but very filthy like New Delhi or India in general. Second filthiest is Malaysia.

The cleanest city is without a doubt Singapore.

darrenf · 22 days ago

> I spent a lot of time working is South East Asia. Jakarta is the worst city, yes it is big but very filthy like New Delhi or India in general. Second filthiest is Malaysia.

Malaysia's a pretty decent size country, not a city. Can't say as I'd have referred to KL as filthy on any of my visits (admittedly only 3 times over the past 12 years). Kuching wasn't filthy either.

darrenf commented on After my dad died, we found the love letters jenn.site/after-my-dad-di... · Posted by u/eatitraw

dartharva · 25 days ago

Interesting anecdote, but for the life of me I can't understand what relevance this blogpost could have here on HackerNews

darrenf · 25 days ago

Quoting the “what to submit” guidelines: If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

darrenf commented on New OS aims to provide (some) compatibility with macOS github.com/ravynsoft/ravy... · Posted by u/kasajian

kombine · a month ago

I don't keep the record of every thing that I don't like about MacOS, but here's some:

- cannot keep natural scrolling for trackpad whilst having the expected scrolling behaviour for the mouse

- needs an external app for fractional display scaling

- screenshot tool is objectively inferior to that in Plasma, eg. not clear how to annotate a screenshot or copy it to clipboard

- Dolphin file browser is has cleaner and simpler UI, is more configurable and has a built-in terminal which is super handy.

...

darrenf · a month ago

Can’t comment on the others but I copy screenshots to the clipboard multiple times a day in macOS and have done for years. Very frequently I send them via Screen Sharing to another Mac and paste there, something I value hugely.

darrenf commented on What Killed Perl? entropicthoughts.com/what... · Posted by u/speckx

zahlman · a month ago

I remember trying to use the new "reference" feature (when it was new), with "blessing" and so on and so forth, to try to create real data structures, and finding in some way or another that it was just not regular. I can't recall the details, but something along the lines of a feeling that the syntax worked differently for, say, the top level of a tree (or first index of a multidimensional array, etc.) vs the rest of the structure.

darrenf · a month ago

In the main, the sigil refers to the type of the eventual value, regardless of what contains it. The tl;dr is that you mostly use `$` unless you're wanting more than one value, or to dereference (when you use the sigil for the type of reference). Some examples:

    @array = ("a", "b", "c", "d"); # @array contains scalars
    $array[0];                     # use `$` for a single element
    @array[0..2];                  # use `@` for an array slice
    @array = ( [1..5], [6..10] );  # @array now contains array references
    $array[0];                     # use `$` still because references are scalars
    $array[0][1];                  # still use `$` even when going multidimensional
    @{ $array[0] };                # use `@` to dereference an array ref to array
    %hash = ( a => "b", c => "d"); # % for hash of key/value pairs
    $hash{a};                      # `$` because you're getting a single scalar
    @hash{"a","c"};                # `@` because you're getting an array of values

Where things become a bit less regular is the difference between reference and non-reference for hashes and arrays when they are top level. At the top level, you need a `->` but that becomes optional at levels below (because at levels below, they have to be references).

    $arrayref = [1,1,2,3,5];       # `$` because we're creating an array reference
    $arrayref->[0];                # `->` because top level
    $arrayref = [ [ 1 ], [ 2 ] ];  # arrayref of arrayrefs
    $arrayref->[0][0];             # no second `->`
    $arrayref->[0]->[0];           # ... but you can use it if you want!

And then there's stuff like getting a slice out of an arrayref

    $arrayref = [1,1,2,3,5];
    $arrayref->@[0..3]; # oh dear. get a real array with an `@` but not at the start!

So... yeah.

darrenf commented on What Killed Perl? entropicthoughts.com/what... · Posted by u/speckx

maxlybbert · a month ago

I don’t think Google was ever a Perl shop. eBay and Amazon were, apparently. Netscape wrote Bugzilla in Perl. I’m sure there were others.

darrenf · a month ago

Yahoo! had a shitload of Perl.