miav

Every thread has a cynical AI accusation from someone looking for an excuse to dismiss long articles, so I tend to gloss over them, but this one's mind-boggling.

Literally how did you come to the conclusion this was written by ChatGPT? The text is clearly written by a polish person that speaks fluent english as a second language - I know cause I am one. Telltale signs are sentences like "Meanwhile, shares are at records" which is an overly direct translation of the polish equivalent, where the word "rekord" by itself implies a record high whereas in english you'd make it explicit.

Based.

I’m using it for private, not publicly visible code right now.

I agree that this is an issue, but.. no, they probably don’t. Light themes are very rarely used.

Holy shit this made my day. Warp’s convenience shell wrapping is amazing. It’s the only terminal where I can actually edit a long command in place rather than copy pasting into an editor and doing so there. Now I’m more or less assured I can retain this convenience without being forced into more AI crap.

This is an excellent addition to the lineup and changes the list of reasons for why the average person would go for a Windows laptop from “cost” to practically nothing, but from a consumer perspective, is there any reason to buy this over M1 MBA which can be purchased new for less than the education discounted version of the MB Neo?

It is genuinely incredible how well-fitting clothing is only generally available to some one-third of women who fit well into the anticipated height-waist ratio. Petite options exist in some places, but god forbid you're tall - your choices will be limited to "too short" and "too short and also too wide" if you try to go for a size up.

The reaction to Discord age verification fiasco once again makes me believe that HN users just don’t have friends.

There is no alternative for Discord for bigger groups.

If there was, I still couldn’t move multiple social circles to it, no matter how much I evangelised.

The “just don’t use the less morally aligned platform” argument has always been valid only for those without a strong need for it, whether it’s X or Discord.

Is this genuinely common? I’ve only ever seen that level of hand holding extended to new grad hires.

I don’t understand how? Wouldn’t the signal be highly directional? Surely it wouldn’t be easily detectable unless the viewer’s POV intersects the path of the beam?

Anecdotal, as a kid I was really into CS:GO skin betting. Ended up losing my entire collection, never gambled since.

Guys, the author presents an overall reasonable argument and I think it's more useful to engage with it in good faith than going "so it's all my fault just because I'm a man?" - no one's implying that.

At its simplest, the point is that much of programming language design is done with a masculine perspective that values technical excellence and very little feminine perspective that focuses more on social impact. Most, including myself, have a knee-jerk reaction to dismiss this argument since at first glance it appears to trade off something known useful for something that's usually little else than a buzzword, but upon further reflection the argument is sensible.

The theme of forsaking technological perfectionism in favor of reaching whatever end goal you have set is widely circulated on this forum and generally agreed with. Those of us that work as software engineers know that impact of your work is always valued more than the implementation or technical details. It's thus reasonable that when building programming languages, the needs and experience of the users should be considered. Not override everything else, but be factored into the equation.

I know if I were to write a programming language I'd probably focus on pushing the boundaries of what's technologically possible, because I find it fun and interesting. But I would have to agree that even if I did succeed in doing so, the actual impact of my work would probably be lower than that of Hedy - the author's language. Hedy is not novel technologically, but the fact that it makes it meaningfully easier to learn programming for significant numbers of people is real, undeniable impact.

Lastly, I want to note that the author's argument for underrepresentation of women in PL cannot be reduced to "those nasty men are keeping us out". Humans are tribal and any group of humans is bound to form complex social structures. Those are going to affect different people in different ways, linked paper investigates the effect on those structures on specifically women because the topic is close to the author. Whether you care about low numbers of women in PL design or not, the dynamics that have led to that being the case are worth investigating and are quite interesting on their own.

The author is not advocating for friendlier messages in the googlesque sense of dumbing them down or introducing more positive wording, but in the sense of making them more readable and useful.

Of course it does not matter for "a straightforward computer error message", in cases where the error is a simple type mismatch or a missed semicolon, but if those were the majority of the problems we encounter as programmers, our work would be trivial.

It's not difficult to imagine a situation where structuring a compiler in such a way that it keeps more state and perhaps has to perform more analysis is worthwhile, since a more useful error message saves the user time in understanding and fixing a problem.

An example that comes to mind is when in Rust I tried to create a dynamically dispatched trait, where the trait in question contained a function an argument of which was generic over a different, statically dispatched trait. Since the compiler did not know at compile time the exact object which would be instantiated, it was incapable of inferring the exact type of the second, statically dispatched trait at compile time, thus failing to compile.

The error was presented to me in a clear way that pointed out the problematic relationship between dispatch types of the two traits allowing me to understand and fix the problem quickly. If the error message was far simpler, such as "can't dynamically dispatch trait", I would have figured that out too, but it would have simply taken more valuable time. Most importantly, having to track down the issue from a minimal error message, would not have been an honorable test of my intelligence and emotional maturity, it simply would have been inefficient.

This is about end-to-end encryption. Google doesn’t do that.