lmm (u/lmm) - Readit News

lmm commented on Code review can be better tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025... · Posted by u/sealeck

caspar · 3 days ago

Stash was not an acquisition. Stash was built from the ground up inside Atlassian during its golden age, by a bunch of engineers who really cared about performance. Though it helped that they didn't have Jira's 'problem' of having 8 figures of revenue hanging off a terrible database schema designed a decade ago.

You might be thinking of Fisheye/Crucible, which were acquisitions, and suffered the traditional fate of being sidelined.

(You are 100% correct that Stash/Bitbucket Server has also been sidelined, but that has everything to do with their cloud SaaS model generating more revenue than selling self-hosted licenses. The last time I used it circa 2024, it was still way faster than Bitbucket Cloud though.)

Source: worked at Atlassian for a long time but left a few years ago.

lmm · an hour ago

Yeah I think I was remembering things backwards - since they put Stash under the Bitbucket organisation and branding it looked as if Bitbucket was their own product and Stash the outside acquisition, but it was actually the other way around.

lmm commented on The Core of Rust jyn.dev/the-core-of-rust/... · Posted by u/zdw

kiitos · 4 hours ago

> Filenames on Unix can be arbitrary byte sequences, and even on Windows they can be characters that don't exist in the current locale.

In which case(s) it is the responsibility of the thing that wants to print them to make them printable, right?

I guess we're using different definitions of "printable" which makes this a discussion rooted in semantics which isn't very interesting.

lmm · an hour ago

> In which case(s) it is the responsibility of the thing that wants to print them to make them printable, right?

Which makes surfacing that responsibility to your application code, as Rust does, better than e.g. silently turning them into empty strings, as some other languages do, no?

lmm commented on Privately-Owned Rail Cars amtrak.com/privately-owne... · Posted by u/jasoncartwright

bombcar · 3 days ago

https://youtu.be/xp-b4Ce4Mf4

YouTube exists for this video.

lmm · 2 days ago

That particular train seems to have an arrangement with Amtrak where they run Amtrak services sometimes. But it will certainly be the result of a bespoke negotiation.

lmm commented on The Core of Rust jyn.dev/the-core-of-rust/... · Posted by u/zdw

kiitos · 2 days ago

> Not all filenames are printable, but most languages don't help you deal with this

literally every filename is printable, the question is only how to render the filename in a "printable" form, which is a function of the filename and the destination output

this isn't an interesting problem, every language and/or its stdlib should have reasonable defaults for this kind of thing. these kinds of details are exactly the kinds of things that a program like the one in the OP shouldn't need to care about, unless they explicitly opt-in to that complexity

> in other languages you face the same problems, those languages just won't help you handle them.

good languages let you handle these sorts of problems, but they don't force you to handle them. whereas rust lifts all of these problems up to the programmer directly and unavoidably and says "hey you need to deal with this"

managing low-level details like ownership or memory management or whatever isn't somehow inherently virtuous or valuable

lmm · 2 days ago

> literally every filename is printable

Nope. Filenames on Unix can be arbitrary byte sequences, and even on Windows they can be characters that don't exist in the current locale.

> this isn't an interesting problem, every language and/or its stdlib should have reasonable defaults for this kind of thing.

It's not an interesting problem until you hit it. OSes should set better standards, but given that they can't or won't, every application needs to handle that case.

lmm commented on I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform old.reddit.com/r/Entrepre... · Posted by u/bilsbie

sfn42 · 2 days ago

As a developer I work closely with my managers and designers etc to ensure that our project goes smoothly and that we create a good product. I don't necessarily decide what we build but I have a lot of ways to influence what we build and how.

We talk about stuff, we plan stuff, I chip in and people listen. Whenever I see devs complaining about how terrible their project management is I think to myself that the dev is probably at least partially responsible.

Maybe I'm just lucky to have good colleagues, but when I talk about software engineering topics people listen and take it seriously. I think that's a big part of our job as developers, we know the tech and we guide our managers just as they guide us. We're a team, we work together.

lmm · 2 days ago

In my experience the kind of project management that doesn't value engineering input on technical matters tends to be exactly the kind of project management that doesn't value engineering input on process changes.

lmm commented on Skill issues – Dialectical Behavior Therapy and its discontents (2024) thedriftmag.com/skill-iss... · Posted by u/zt

gxonatano · 3 days ago

> Most versions of Zen are made-up export products designed to flatter Westerners. Kind of like the samurai movie honor bushido stuff.

I don't think so. If you go to a zenkai or a sesshin held by a western zendo, and then go to one at a Japanese temple, you won't notice too many differences, apart from the language. Many American zen teachers trained in Japan at some point, or their teachers did, and they brought these practices back more or less verbatim. In fact, in many American zendos, students chant the same sutras, _in Japanese_, as in Japanese zendos. Plus, there are regulatory bodies, like the Soto Zen school, that certify affiliated western zendos as authoritative. It's not made-up, it's hardly an "export product," and it certainly isn't designed to flatter anyone.

> https://vividness.live/zen-vs-the-u-s-navy

That seems like a rambling, self-published book by a Vajrayana practitioner with an axe to grind against Zen, for some bizarre reason. But there are plenty of real books about the rise of American Zen, or Buddhism in the west, that are well-researched. _Zen in America_ by Helen Tworkov is one.

> Japanese people think Buddhism is a thing you do at funerals.

Not at all. Buddhism, and Zen especially, permeate Japanese culture very deeply. Japanese aesthetics, architecture, landscape design, visual art, calligraphy, the tea ceremony, and the martial arts, have all been strongly influenced by Zen. And it's all over pop culture, too—just think of how pervasive Daruma dolls are—that's Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen. Sure, Buddhism is at funerals, but it's everywhere, else, too.

> If you get into it more seriously, I vaguely understand it's mostly a religion that tells you not to have sex.

Maybe you're thinking of Christianity? Unless you're a monk, attitudes towards sex are fairly liberal in Buddhism. There are bodhisattva precepts that caution against misusing sex, but nowhere does anyone tell you not to have it. In fact, it's largely unconcerned with it, let alone "mostly a religion that tells you not to have" it. Western religions are very concerned with telling you what to do and not do, but Buddhism is concerned with liberation.

lmm · 3 days ago

> > Japanese people think Buddhism is a thing you do at funerals.

> Buddhism, and Zen especially, permeate Japanese culture very deeply. Japanese aesthetics, architecture, landscape design, visual art, calligraphy, the tea ceremony, and the martial arts, have all been strongly influenced by Zen. And it's all over pop culture, too—just think of how pervasive Daruma dolls are—that's Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen. Sure, Buddhism is at funerals, but it's everywhere, else, too.

Your statement may be true but so is the grandparent's. (Although I agree that there isn't much about not having sex; mainly you hear about monks don't eat meat, or at least not while people are looking)

lmm commented on I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform old.reddit.com/r/Entrepre... · Posted by u/bilsbie

yen223 · 3 days ago

The first rule of Hacker News comments is it's never the engineer's fault

lmm · 3 days ago

It can be the engineer's fault if it's an engineering mistake. But bad process is the fault of the people who control the process and bad product management is the fault of the people who control the product management.

lmm commented on The Core of Rust jyn.dev/the-core-of-rust/... · Posted by u/zdw

Spivak · 3 days ago

I mean both languages (and programs) have modules, string interpolation, lambda syntax, and a compiler/interpreter. The only thing they really left out is Promises. And you're iterating over an array so there's no understanding of iterators needed. You can write Python for a long time without ever learning about __iter__. In the example Rust program the iterator is exposed. I think if the Rust version only used the for syntax you could say you don't need to know about iterators.

lmm · 3 days ago

Javascript has exceptions (the article even mentions them, but seems to assume that they're somehow intuitive?) whereas Rust doesn't. And the Javascript "first-class function" syntax isn't really objectively simpler than the Rust lambda syntax, which the article seems to assume.

lmm commented on The Core of Rust jyn.dev/the-core-of-rust/... · Posted by u/zdw

kiitos · 3 days ago

> Let’s look at a Rust program that does something non-trivial: ... (a bunch of highly specific explanations of deeply technical details from the very short program source code)

what does this program actually do?

all of this extraordinarily subtle analysis, about rust language specific properties, specific to this individual program, and no actual summary or description of what the program is supposed to do!

what it does is print out a line whenever a file, matching certain criteria, is modified. that's it.

and as such it's an almost pitch-perfect example of exactly what's difficult with rust as a language. what this program does is trivial to describe and should have a commensurately simple implementation. but rust makes the programmer care about a dozen? dozens? of details that have no relevance to the problem domain at hand.

for people who are just hungry for complexity this is an exciting challenge that they can tackle and solve! but that complexity, that challenge, is self-inflicted, almost always incidental and unnecessary work

lmm · 3 days ago

> and as such it's an almost pitch-perfect example of exactly what's difficult with rust as a language. what this program does is trivial to describe and should have a commensurately simple implementation. but rust makes the programmer care about a dozen? dozens? of details that have no relevance to the problem domain at hand.

As the other comments have said, in other languages you face the same problems, those languages just won't help you handle them. Not all filenames are printable, but most languages don't help you deal with this. Almost all languages have some way that functions can fail and not return the kind of value you wanted - in Rust this is done by having a return type that shows it might return a different kind of value, in other languages this is done by having a novel concept of "exceptions" and you have to worry about whether every function is "exception safe", which is not actually simpler even if it looks like it at first glance. Etc.

lmm commented on The Core of Rust jyn.dev/the-core-of-rust/... · Posted by u/zdw

Bratmon · 3 days ago

> It's easy to fall into a trap where your Banana class becomes a GorillaHoldingTheBananaAndTheEntireJungle class(to borrow a phrase from Joe Armstrong), and nothing ever gets freed because everything is always referenced by something else.

Can you elaborate on this? I'm struggling to picture a situation in which I have a gorilla I'm currently using, but keeping the banana it's holding and the jungle it's in alive is a bad thing.

lmm · 3 days ago

The joke is you're using the banana but you didn't actually want the gorilla, much less the whole jungle. E.g. you might have an object that represents the single database row you're doing something with, but it's keeping alive a big result set and a connection handle and a transaction. The same thing happening with just an in-memory datastructure (e.g. you computed some big tree structure to compute the result you need) is less bad, but it can still impact your memory usage quite a lot.