gintery (u/gintery) - Readit News

gintery commented on Fast high-level programming languages lh3.github.io/2020/05/17/... · Posted by u/stanislavb

Compilers aren't different from pretty much every other kind of software, for which it's generally painfully obvious that two programs that target the same data _format_ will not necessarily output the exact same _data_, especially when they have wildly differing end goals.

I don't think every article discussing benchmarks has to restate that the differences between programming languages are not just syntactical to be informative.

gintery · 6 years ago

I'm not sure I follow. What I meant is that a benchmark over a specific task is not really informative without a comparison of why it is slower in some languages compare to other.

gintery commented on “Become Abnormal”: traits to cultivate for top performance capitalandgrowth.org/answ... · Posted by u/jkuria

thomk · 6 years ago

You completely missed my point. Here: God doesn't exist, I'm in competition with myself only, I can't control the outcome or anyone or anything at all including my emotions, only my individual behavior.

gintery · 6 years ago

I see. That makes more sense. That being said, you are still framing life as a competition/game which I'm not sure I see the point in. For what it's worth, I view religion mostly as a mechanism for encouraging behavior which is collectively beneficial. We are all better off if we act in ways that are trustworthy, even if that means individual sacrifice in some cases, and so the whole afterlife b.s. is just a way of suggesting a lifestyle which is pro-social. Case in point, even people who supposedly believe in paradise don't act like it.

gintery commented on “Become Abnormal”: traits to cultivate for top performance capitalandgrowth.org/answ... · Posted by u/jkuria

thomk · 6 years ago

Your points here are exactly why I am no longer religious.

Also, if you are easily offended, I'd skip the rest of this, I do not want to offend anyone, these are my opinions alone.

If you worship any God, then you can never be as good as your God. You can never be #1 even after you die. The whole framework sets you up for a life of the inability to win. You are at BEST going to be #2 because you can never ever be #1. Every religious person who worships a God is going to feel like they are a loser; because they are not and never will be #1 a 'winner'. It is exhausting.

I have not had a good experience with Christians in my everyday life. I'm sorry to say that, but when I meet someone and they tell me they are Christian; I immediately become suspicious of them. I have learned this from many, many interactions.

I think it has something to do with comparing yourself to God. "I am not #1. Sometimes I am close to #1 and sometimes I am very far from #1. When I am far from #1, maybe I steal a little or lie a little. I know I can get closer to #1 later and be forgiven (by the true #1)."

It's a sliding scale. There's no permanence.

They only way to win that game is to not play. Once you realize that not only are you already #1 there is no #2. You are responsible for you. That means you live exactly by your own personal values. For me it means I never lie or steal and that decision is not based on how I feel about myself!

I have a friend who is a Buddhist monk. We were talking about emotions recently and she said something I now think about every day: "You can't control your emotions. Don't even try, they are far too powerful. You can only control your BEHAVIOR."

I am in control of me. Nothing else is in control of me, not even my own emotions. And since I am in control of me, who else is to blame if my life is not working out?

That's not American my friend, that wisdom is ancient.

gintery · 6 years ago

Your whole post is extremely American. Why do you want to be #1 compared to anyone, let alone compared to God? You are no longer religious because your self-centric world-view is incompatible with believing anyone can be better than you, which includes God? I have trouble believing you are serious.

gintery commented on Modern C++ gamedev: thoughts and misconceptions vittorioromeo.info/index/... · Posted by u/ingve

xfs · 6 years ago

I stopped using it for locals after it increased my mental load. The maintenance cost of const for all local variables is huge during refactor like you're fighting it just to get things done. And in most cases where the type of a variable matters I do have to glance around like when I need to remove a variable or change its type or refactor its dependent variables so const doesn't really for those cases.

gintery · 6 years ago

If you have to assign to a const variable during a small refactor, then maybe it shouldn't have been const in the first place? I'm struggling to imagine examples where this is a real problem

gintery commented on Modern C++ gamedev: thoughts and misconceptions vittorioromeo.info/index/... · Posted by u/ingve

PezzaDev · 6 years ago

After years of experience writing code for games, I find that the dumbest code is the best code. It doesn't matter if it's C# or C++, whenever I've used something like reactive extensions or template metaprogramming, it has been a terrible mistake every single time. Make your code simple, dumb and verbose all the time. Avoid using any complex abstractions or any overcomplicated syntactic sugar and you'll have a codebase that anyone can jump into and quickly be able to add features without introducing bugs (at least less likely). This matters more than anything else.

gintery · 6 years ago

Is the code really that complex? Overly verbose, maybe, but its really not that hard to follow even for someone who doesn't know much about C++ templates.

gintery commented on Modern C++ gamedev: thoughts and misconceptions vittorioromeo.info/index/... · Posted by u/ingve

xfs · 6 years ago

If you as a reader need const to make sure a local variable is not changed this is usually a symptom of this function being too long to see at a glance. And quite often as code changes I do need to make some local variable non-const, and it quickly becomes annoying to fiddle back and forth enforcing const-ness of every local variable.

The argument about optimization is almost certainly premature optimization. Most of the time how you write a loop doesn't matter. You only find out what matters via profiling and refactor accordingly.

gintery · 6 years ago

Most people hate const at first (myself included) but once you get used to it, it really does reduces mental load. Not having to glance around is precisely the point, its not a big thing but it does help.

gintery commented on Deno 1.0 deno.land/v1... · Posted by u/0xedb

didip · 6 years ago

I like what Deno is selling. URL like import path is great, I don't know why people are dismissing it. It is easy to get up-and-running quickly.

Looks like my personal law/rule is in effect again: The harsher HN critics are, the more successful the product will be. I have no doubt Deno will be successful.

gintery · 6 years ago

Your law is hilarious. I tend to check the comments before reading a post: if they say the idea is terrible, I know I should read it.

gintery commented on Show HN: I made a Chrome extension to stop mindless browsing getintention.com/... · Posted by u/namuorg

gintery · 6 years ago

Now my compulsive snoozing can continue even during daytime :)

gintery commented on Ask HN: Is HN a ‘healthy online community’? I’m doing a case study for a class · Posted by u/sankalpb

sankalpb · 6 years ago

Thanks for raising this point - what makes you say that 'technical' and 'social' are separable as it relates to the problem of 'group-think' and 'sorting content by vote count'?

gintery · 6 years ago

My guess would be that there's a feedback effect, where posters learn to only post comments which are likely to get upvotes. The net effect is that shared opinions converge. Ideally a comment section would be a sample of the whole distribution of opinions, while in practice only the mode of this distribution is represented. This is a direct effect of having votes on comments.

With regards to your question, what I meant was that these two aspects are in fact non-separable. The technical solution (upvotes) shapes the social behavior (the type of discussion) very strongly.