rowls66 (u/rowls66) - Readit News

rowls66 commented on 10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13 datocms.com/blog/a-look-b... · Posted by u/steffoz

le-mark · 3 months ago

The website is pretty good. My initial reaction was “A CMS? How can yet another CMS be profitable”. The copy on the homepage explains it pretty well. Congrats on the success.

rowls66 · 3 months ago

My initial reation was 'What is a CMS'? Naming your company or an initialism and never saying anywhere in the product description what the initials mean is not welcoming. Now I know that anyone who does not know that a CMS is a 'Content Management System' is probably not a likely customer, but you never know, and expanding the initials somewhere shold probably be possible.

rowls66 commented on Waymo has received our pilot permit allowing for commercial operations at SFO waymo.com/blog/#short-all... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect

OkayPhysicist · 6 months ago

Inside SF, my experience is that Uber and Lyft are ~10-15% cheaper than Waymo, but that's before tipping. I don't have to tip a robot, so they work out to nearly identical prices.

rowls66 · 6 months ago

You don't have to tip an Uber or Lyft driver either.

rowls66 commented on UTF-8 is a brilliant design iamvishnu.com/posts/utf8-... · Posted by u/vishnuharidas

wrs · 6 months ago

UTF-16 made lots of sense at the time because Unicode thought "65,536 characters will be enough for anybody" and it retains the 1:1 relationship between string elements and characters that everyone had assumed for decades. I.e., you can treat a string as an array of characters and just index into it with an O(1) operation.

As Unicode (quickly) evolved, it turned out not that only are there WAY more than 65,000 characters, there's not even a 1:1 relationship between code points and characters, or even a single defined transformation between glyphs and code points, or even a simple relationship between glyphs and what's on the screen. So even UTF-32 isn't enough to let you act like it's 1980 and str[3] is the 4th "character" of a string.

So now we have very complex string APIs that reflect the actual complexity of how human language works...though lots of people (mostly English-speaking) still act like str[3] is the 4th "character" of a string.

UTF-8 was designed with the knowledge that there's no point in pretending that string indexing will work. Windows, MacOS, Java, JavaScript, etc. just missed the boat by a few years and went the wrong way.

rowls66 · 6 months ago

I think more effort should have been made to live with 65,536 characters. My understanding is that codepoints beyond 65,536 are only used for languages that are no longer in use, and emojis. I think that adding emojis to unicode is going to be seen a big mistake. We already have enough network bandwith to just send raster graphics for images in most cases. Cluttering the unicode codespace with emojis is pointless.

rowls66 commented on The startling rise of disability in America (2013) apps.npr.org/unfit-for-wo... · Posted by u/pseudolus

rowls66 · 9 months ago

This article is nearly 15 years old (2013). According to center on budget and policy priorities, the number of SSDI beneficiaries has fallen from is peak in 2014. So this article was written about a trend that peaked a year after its publication and had reversed over the past 15 years. Odd that it would be reposted today.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/social-securit...

rowls66 commented on Defold: cross-platform game engine defold.com... · Posted by u/xd

auggierose · a year ago

Because they don't want somebody else to sell their game engine? It's pretty clear, isn't it?

rowls66 · a year ago

Why would anyone buy their game engine when it is available for free? Seems like a solution for a problem that doesn't/won't exist.

rowls66 commented on Ask HN: What less-popular systems programming language are you using? · Posted by u/fuzztester

chris_armstrong · a year ago

OCaml

The compiler is very fast, even over large codebases.

Mostly trying to bring AWS tooling to the platform[1], or experimenting with cross-compilation[2] using another less well known systems language, zig.

[1] https://github.com/chris-armstrong/smaws/ [2] https://github.com/chris-armstrong/opam-cross-lambda

rowls66 · a year ago

Can a systems programming lanugage use garbage collection? I don't think so.

rowls66 commented on What Was Chevron Deference? (2023) minimumcomp.com/p/maxmin-... · Posted by u/tldrthelaw

rowls66 · 2 years ago

Seems to me that if Congress would prefer that any disputes arising from the implementation of their laws be handled by the admistrative agency charged with enforcing it, all they need to do is say so in the law. Not sure how the courts could get around that.

rowls66 commented on Just Enough Software Architecture (2010) georgefairbanks.com/book/... · Posted by u/teleforce

rowls66 · 2 years ago

I found 'A Philosophy of Software Design' by John Ousterhout to be useful. It contains alot of solid easy to understand advice with many examples.

rowls66 commented on Unit Tests Considered Harmful shaiyallin.com/post/unit-... · Posted by u/kiyanwang

rowls66 · 2 years ago

I think whats more harmful than unit tests are code coverage metrics for unit tests that devs feel compelled or are required to achieve. The easiest way to achieve code coverage goals for tests is to write lots of small tests that test individual methods, but test very little of the interaction between them.

I feel that the goal of unit testing should be to test the largest unit possible without requiring external dependencies. In the language of domain driven design, this means to test the domain model. If you can get extensive coverage of the domain model as a whole, system tests can be used to test the complete system.

Alas, I have seen very few software systems with high quality domain models. It is not an easy thing to achieve.

rowls66 commented on Anatomy of a credit card rewards program bitsaboutmoney.com/archiv... · Posted by u/disgruntledphd2

paulmd · 2 years ago

So get one of the cards that offers 3% on everything / 2.5% and no international transaction fees, and just cash it out monthly or whatever? You’re not being cool or whatever, “my big brain is too full for such trivialities!” you’re just leaving >$100/mo on the table (for most households here) for literally zero effort beyond clicking "redeem" when you want it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/CreditCards/wiki/list_of_flat_cashb...

But credit card fees exist, and will exist regardless of what you choose. Just like filing for your tax return - you can either take the money or let the bank+merchant have it. But maybe you're just too busy to be bothered by reclaiming that money, too?

The amex "I pay $500/y for a 3% card with rotating quarterly 4% and 5% categories" shit though? Yeah, I agree, ain't nobody got time for that.

rowls66 · 2 years ago

You need to spend $16,666 just to cover the $500 annual fee. That’s a lot for many people especially when many low end retailers don’t accept AmEx. As already state rewards cards are a subsidy for the rich, or at least for people who spend a lot.