verinus (u/verinus) - Readit News

verinus commented on Watching "Grizzly Man" with a bear biologist backpacker.com/survival/w... · Posted by u/cainxinth

tstrimple · a year ago

There is a part of me that strongly identifies with the "Grizzly Man" and Supertramps of the world. Yeah, often they make stupid decisions and go into things unprepared. But they are willing to go into the unknown in a way the vast majority of society is not. They are trying to experience the world as humans throughout history have experienced the world. And their experience ending in their death isn't the condemnation that people seem to think it is. Because that's where we all end up. And they reached that point by doing things that were not just outside of their comfort zone but the comfort zone of every normie in this country. They are easy to ridicule from the safety of a youtube video, but these people actually lived in these places and experienced these things in a way the vast majority of modern humanity never will. It's easy to judge. It's far more difficult to live in a way that defies society. Even when those lives are cut short, I think it's worth exploring and celebrating. They were trying to buck the trend. They were real hackers in a way most on this site cannot really comprehend.

verinus · a year ago

Being stupid and selfish should not be celebrated at all but warned against!

He did not understand bears, just saw them how he wanted them to be and actually did them a severe disservice!

Going outside of you comfort zone is valuable though, but only if done with knowledge of your own limits and consequences!

e.g. I live in the Alps and we have much too many stupid tourists' emergencies in the mountains due to ignorance than should be. They know nothing about the mountains, the tour, how weather is up there, what equipment and clothing to bring and wear and completely disregard advice of locals. Then Mountain Rescue risk their lives and health to get them down. Most of them volunteers no less!

verinus commented on Ask HN: How to manage phones and PCs for elderly parents? · Posted by u/thepuppet33r

ryandrake · a year ago

> I've had to explain to my dad that eventually the software on the phone will be so old that new apps can't go on it. He looks at me in confusion and aggression and asks why

I’m with dad on this one! I have so much perfectly good hardware that becomes increasingly useless because Apple stopped providing updates, and 3rd party software developers insist that I’m running the absolute latest OS. I’m at that point yet again with an iPhone 7 that works flawlessly but when I go to get new apps, “SORRY LOSER. You need bleeding edge iOS for your bank’s stupid app!”

I’ll channel your dad’s aggression if I ever meet a Schwab software engineer in person. I complain to every Apple employee I know, too, but they all look at me like I’m crazy for not just buying a new phone every year.

verinus · a year ago

You fail to understand how software development and maintenance works.

OFC you need an updated system that has all known security holes fixed to run homebanking apps.

Also, as a dev I would only support one config and not a myriad of different devices and operating system versions (APIs). Livelong. For 3$ purchase price. On all devices. For the whole family.

And imho Apple devices are supported much longer than most Android ones...

verinus commented on Write Dumb Code (2018) matthewrocklin.com/write-... · Posted by u/dvcoolarun

LudwigNagasena · 2 years ago

There are too many articles that preach dumb code, KISS, etc. I think the issue is overemphasized, especially in the modern age of bootcamps and whatnot. Who is writing all that "smart code" people are complaining about? If code seems too smart for you, maybe PEBCAK. That seems far more realistic nowadays than ever before.

> Look! I replaced this recursive function with a for loop and it still does everything that we need it to. I know it’s not as clever, but I noticed that the interns were having trouble with it and I thought that this change might help.

Recursion is not clever, it is not a trick. It's a basic technique kids learn in high school in Advanced Placement CompSci A. I do not want to work with people who know less about their professional field of choice compared to kids. And if the educational system has failed interns, at least let them learn what recursion is on the job! Isn't that what internship is for anyway?

Honestly, I don't even get the sentiment. Many problems are naturally formulated in terms of recursion. And rewriting them as loops would be considered an optimization technique that obfuscates the reasoning.

verinus · 2 years ago

to me it seem you have bad experience and I agree that this kind of simple may be the wrong kind of simple ;)

but: for me simple is to have a short and concise solution of a problem/ requirement that does exactly what is required and not more.

verinus commented on Write Dumb Code (2018) matthewrocklin.com/write-... · Posted by u/dvcoolarun

GMoromisato · 2 years ago

This advice boils down to "write good code." Unfortunately, practical advice that goes beyond that is really hard.

Software engineering is hard because everything is a trade off! Should I add another layer of abstraction or just add another optional parameter? Should I add flexibility for future requirements or simplify the code so it's obvious to a junior programmer?

The answer to almost every question is, "It depends!"

What are the skills of the dev team? How much time do you have? Do you already have a lot of tech debt? Are you building a prototype or a safety-critical system?

Worse, many answers depend on unknowable facts: How will requirements change in the future? Will we ever need this functionality? Did we bet on the right ecosystem?

The best software engineers can balance all these questions, even the ones they don't have answers to, and come up with a design that works. The fact that we, as an industry, can build multi-million-line programs is a minor miracle. The wonder isn't that so many projects fail but that any succeed.

If anyone were to ask me for advice--which I notice they're not--I would just say two things:

1. Write lots of programs.

2. Work with good software engineers.

verinus · 2 years ago

for me I try to find the simplest solution that fulfils the requirement I have for the task on hand. No fancy abstractions/ design patterns- most of the time you don't need them, and when you do you certainly need them in another way, completely different from the one you chose. Abstraction based on sample size one and "foresight" is a sure mark of a noob :)

verinus commented on Clean your codebase with basic information theory taylor.town/compress-code... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

valty · 2 years ago

> In my experience, the key to maintaining readability is developing a healthy respect for locality

I think this pursuit of "locality" is what actually causes more complexity. And I think its mainly around our obsession with representing our code as text files in folder hierarchies.

> coarsely structure codebases around CPU timelines and dataflow

This is why I would prefer code to be in a database, instead of files and folders, so that structure doesn't matter, and the tree view UI can be organized based on runtime code paths, and data flow - via value tracing.

> don’t pollute your namespace – use blocks to restrict variables/functions to the smallest possible scope

Everyone likes to be all modular and develop in tiny little pieces that they assemble together. Relying on modularization means that when stuff changes upstream in the call stack, we just hack around these changes adding some conditionals to handle these changes instead of resorting to larger refactors. People like this because things can keep moving instead of everything breaking.

Instead, what we need to do is make it easier to trace all the data dependencies in our programs so that when we make a change to anything, we can instantly see what depends on it and needs updating.

I have actually started to think that, against conventional wisdom, everything should be a global variable. All the issues with global variables can be solved with better tracing tooling.

Instead we end up with all these little mini-databases spread all over our code, when what we should have is one central one from which we can clearly see all the data dependencies.

> group related concepts together

Instead, we should query a database of code as needed...just like we do with our normalized data.

verinus · 2 years ago

I was thinking about code along the same lines: we are modeling, not writing text. This just happens to be the best way to express our models in a way a computer can be made to understand it, be formal enough and still be understandable by others.

What current languages are bad about is expressing architecture, and the problem of having one way to structure our models (domain models) vs. the actions/transformations that run on them (flow of execution).

I strongly disagree on the global variable side though...

verinus commented on Losing my son fortressofdoors.com/i-los... · Posted by u/lukeplato

verinus · 2 years ago

and I find your judgement on this quite disturbing, even arrogant.

there is a reason nearly all religions take a stance against killing, even killing yourself!

and for me it starts with: who am I to judge somebody should rather be dead than alive? do you REALLY know?

verinus commented on Patrick McKenzie (patio11) on navigating complex systems conversationswithtyler.co... · Posted by u/kulor

RandomLensman · 2 years ago

I am thinking quite practical: do I prefer the internet over dying from smallpox or appendicitis, for example?

The added benefit of the internet for mass collaboration isn't that much in the data... why hasn't productivity exploded upward? Why hasn't medical progress gone through the roof? Scientist collaborated long before the internet. Quite strong progress was made without it.

verinus · 2 years ago

I am certain in some areas it has. but on the other hand in others it has damaged it- screentime is an awesome feature measuring "destroyed" productivity ;)

verinus commented on Patrick McKenzie (patio11) on navigating complex systems conversationswithtyler.co... · Posted by u/kulor

andy_ppp · 2 years ago

Is this as good as searching Google? The point is the internet has improved medicine as well.

verinus · 2 years ago

sure, but to such a fundamental amount? or was it IT- the internet is not IT, super computers and simulations, databases and so are not the internet...

I like google but google is only as good as the stuff out there, and then finding useful content (that is not popular) is hard, and getting even harder the more content is produced.

greed in the form of ads also don't help much...

verinus commented on Patrick McKenzie (patio11) on navigating complex systems conversationswithtyler.co... · Posted by u/kulor

roenxi · 2 years ago

It is nonsensical as thought experiments go; we're comparing two things that can't be compared. But just for fun - if we existed in a world with no medicine and the internet, we'd be able to rediscover modern medicine extremely quickly. We might reasonably expect to get further than the current state of the art, in fact, because the initial wild west phase wouldn't be encumbered by overzealous safety regulation and we'd learn more before the legislatures of the world start shutting it down (especially since the baseline would be so horrific, they'd probably have tougher stomachs for some broken eggs while making omelettes).

We ran the reverse (medicine then internet) and it took a long time to get to the internet.

verinus · 2 years ago

science was there long before the internet, and if history teaches us one thing it is, that gaining fundamental knowledge takes time- often generations (where one generation must die for new ideas to spread)

so no, the internet may be good for lots of things, but it would by no means replace the groundwork required over centuries to come up with modern medicine...

verinus commented on Patrick McKenzie (patio11) on navigating complex systems conversationswithtyler.co... · Posted by u/kulor

glimshe · 2 years ago

People have lived happy lives without the Internet for millennia, in fact I've lived a portion of my life without the Internet and I can remember the "good old days". Life with the Internet is very cool, but it was pretty cool also before it. I won't say that our lives were better before the Internet, but such argument can be made - imagine a world without X, Facebook, TikTok and the scourge of social media; for many people that was a better, slightly simpler world.

Medicine, on the other hand, was responsible for removing an immeasurable amount of pain and suffering from humanity, including having our loved ones (and ourselves) around for much longer. I find hard to believe people would give back antibiotics for anything we have from the post-Internet revolution.

verinus · 2 years ago

esp. when it comes with all the stress of modern work with all the real time communication, social media pressure, constant advertising.

now that I have kids, I grow increasingly conscious towards the effects this has on them.