mdm12 (u/mdm12) - Readit News

mdm12 commented on Study: Consumers Actively Turned Off by AI futurism.com/the-byte/stu... · Posted by u/12_throw_away

prisenco · a year ago

I bemoan AI but it's been disheartening as the hype spreads everywhere. It feels like everyone is building an AI startup.

Maybe I'm naive, but it doesn't feel like we're done building the boring stuff yet.

mdm12 · a year ago

We're not done building the boring stuff or solving the hard problems either. One is, well, boring and the other is...hard. Easy enough to proxy out prompts to OpenAI for your next funding round, though.

mdm12 commented on Misty Programming Language crockford.com/misty/... · Posted by u/Matrixik

incrudible · 2 years ago

> symbols like '≈', '≠', 'ƒ'

He can not be serious, can he? I thought those were just ligatures. Is he typing on an old APL keyboard?

mdm12 · 2 years ago

Other languages that make heavy usage of non-ASCII Unicode characters (such as Lean) often have tooling support such that one can type '\' along with some combination of ASCII characters to generate characters like '≈', '≠' and 'ƒ'. Along with searchable documentation for the whole mapping of shorthand codes to the mapped Unicode values, of course.

Code is read more than written, so I have grown to appreciate programming languages that lean into non-ASCII characters for semantic clarity :)

mdm12 commented on Moving from relational data to events event-driven.io/en/the_en... · Posted by u/alexzeitler

erikpukinskis · 2 years ago

Event sourcing has a lot of nice properties, so I’m intrigued. But don’t you still need relations? And then how do you implement those?

If the answer is “they’re all implicit in the application layer code” then that’s not really acceptable. I still need some way to query for relations, or keep relation views up to date, or something like that.

I don’t mind if relations are not core to your persistence model, but they have to be implemented _somewhere_ in your data layer, and I’m not seeing any mention of that here.

I have the same issue with Firestore, everyone does relations _somehow_ but it’s all just spaghetti application code which isn’t scalable.

mdm12 · 2 years ago

In event sourced systems, you project the event stream into read models, of which there can be many (relational, time series, etc.) If you're familiar with functional programming, it is essentially a fold operation over the stream of events into a single state.

Having worked with event sourced systems in the past, there are benefits in having a persisted explicit event history, but there is much added complexity (how do those read models actually get generated? how do you version the model? do you have snapshots of your read models?). In my experience, the additional complexity was not worth it for most contexts in which the pattern was applied...

mdm12 commented on A new F# compiler feature: graph-based type-checking devblogs.microsoft.com/do... · Posted by u/soheilpro

williamcotton · 2 years ago

I had discovered Scott’s blog in the last couple of days while searching for resources related to writing lexers and parsers in F#. It is indeed a great resource!

Thank you for your other recommendations, I’ve just ordered both books!

mdm12 · 2 years ago

Enjoy your F# journey! I have yet to find a more ergonomic, practical language for daily use :)

mdm12 commented on A new F# compiler feature: graph-based type-checking devblogs.microsoft.com/do... · Posted by u/soheilpro

williamcotton · 2 years ago

Can anyone recommend a good hard copy book for F#? One that covers the syntax, language features, and covers functional programming fundamentals along the way?

Like, the F# book that Brian Kernighan would write?

mdm12 · 2 years ago

I would recommend two. F# in Action [1] by Isaac Abraham is a great (and recent) introduction to the F# language. For a more philosophical, domain-oriented book, you can't go wrong with Scott Wlaschin's Domain Modeling Made Functional book[2]. Scott's blog[3] is also must-read material.

[1] https://www.manning.com/books/f-sharp-in-action

[2] https://pragprog.com/titles/swdddf/domain-modeling-made-func...

[3] https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/

mdm12 commented on Is Htmx Gaining in Popularity? trends.builtwith.com/java... · Posted by u/andrewfromx

nickpeterson · 2 years ago

I’m trying to push it for enterprise internal apps that do a lot of crud operations along with SQLite. It’s really only a hunch at this point, but I’m guessing it will let my mostly back-end oriented dev team more comfortably deliver web app functionality.

mdm12 · 2 years ago

It may be sacrilege to say this, but I have adopted Retool in my organization for the purposes of quick-and-dirty internal apps that are essentially thin GUIs around internal data stores. It has worked out well for us and even stodgy backend engineers like myself can be productive with it.

mdm12 commented on Functional Programming in Lean leanprover.github.io/func... · Posted by u/d_christiansen

d_christiansen · 2 years ago

Lean 4 is an interactive theorem prover. It's also a programming language with a self-hosting compiler. This is a free book on using Lean 4 as a programming language, written without assuming any background in functional programming. It's intended to be accessible to Python, C#, Rust, Kotlin, Java, TypeScript, and Scala developers. Today marks the final release, after more than a year of writing.

mdm12 · 2 years ago

Congratulations on the publication! As a dabbler in strictly typed functional programming languages like Scala and F#, I have always been curious about proof-oriented languages such as Coq or Agda, but found it difficult to justify the time investment. Lean seems to position itself as a theorem proving language that also supports general-purpose programs. Looking forward to digging into your book!

mdm12 commented on Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work blogs.microsoft.com/blog/... · Posted by u/benryon

maxdoop · 2 years ago

I wonder how this will play out.

Yes, it’s pretty awesome and yes, helpful. But if we extend the timeline, doesn’t this likely lead to AI-generated responses talking to AI-generated questions about AI-generated presentations?

mdm12 · 2 years ago

We already have students using AI to generate answers for homework and teachers using automation to grade it. I would say we are already there.

mdm12 commented on A senior engineer's guide to the system design interview interviewing.io/guides/sy... · Posted by u/leeny

rednerrus · 3 years ago

We've gone away from system design interview questions on my team. We ask people to diagram something technical they understand well and the team digs in and asks questions to understand depth and breadth of the candidates understanding. For us it works much better. It's a chance to see how well candidates do in following instructions. It gives you a chance to explore depth and breadth of their knowledge on something technical that they claim to understand. Our philosophy is how well you understand something you claim to know well is indicative of the depth and breadth of your technical knowledge in general. There are plenty of opportunities in this to ask about design and get to know how people think when it comes to design. I think it helps to eliminate false negatives and false positives.

mdm12 · 3 years ago

I have seen this process described elsewhere as 'reverse system design', and it is my preferred approach to evaluating senior candidates as well.