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Becoming Foolish

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21–30 of 35 posts

Re: Becoming Foolish

#21
post #4

This item has 6 points and is number #6 on Hackernews' homepage. The fuck?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html see "How are stories ranked?"

Right, when the stories on the front page are older that time factor dilutes their high scores, giving lower-score but newer posts an advantage.

Re: Becoming Foolish

#22
post #11

Don't learn languages - learn pure paradigms. I can write C# three different ways - imperative procedural, functional, imperative OOP.

I have seen imperative / OOP Python written in the style of Java. It's not great.

bingads python library.

Someone’s getting their line count up.

Re: Becoming Foolish

#23

There has to be a better way of stopping people from upvoting with alt accounts, or emailing a listserve asking for upvotes. One way would be to make sure the article generates good discussion. There are no comments on this article other than complaints that it's on the front page...

Given that I downvoted you and your comment did not turn gray, I have to assume that you've been up-voted by other people. Shooting down a blog article written by somebody from his heart, while upvoting yellow journalism — that's a common phenomenon here on HN — and I should know because this is my 9th year as an HN visitor and contributor. So such mean comments being upvoted, that doesn't look good, but on the other…

> making it easy to bury stories you don't like

I don't believe that's true and have reason to doubt it. But if you (or anyone) think you're seeing a case of this, please send a link to hn@ycombinator.com. We'll look into it.

Re: Becoming Foolish

#24

Nice article. One thing I'm noticing is that I have less and less time to learn and explore. Between the work projects, the open-source projects of my spare time, family life and the entertainment I need to keep some sanity, I can't seem to find the time or the focus necessary for expanding my knowledge. I still do a lot of learning, but as I suspect that most of you are doing, the learning I'm doing is only incremen…

Time is fixed and the things we want to learn is expanding. I'm not sure how to deal with that. For me, there's a real tension between breadth and depth and finding the sweet spot between the two is hard.

This perfectly describes my learning dilemma. If you have a niche job like in the article (visual studio extensions) your skill-set may be narrow enough to easily expand upon and gain depth in a new area. If you are a full stack developer at a small company the breadth of stuff you need to know and learn is such that it seems impossible to master new things.

Re: Becoming Foolish

#26
A lovely post. The Haskell-I/O-inspired brainflip is very nicely described.

I've never been a Haskell programmer, but a thing that struck me about the Idris book (which is mentioned in one of the comments on that post) is its very calm introduction to monadic I/O in terms of the separation between evaluation and execution - which the author of the book (and developer of Idris) manages without using the word monad, I assume deliberately.

There are a lot of appealingly surprising things in Idris. Other languages that have given me that "oh...!" feeling in the further past include Prolog and term-rewriting languages like Pure (and to an extent TeX).

Re: Becoming Foolish

#27
That's why in germany the first course in the first semester of CS teaches you three things: imperative programming, functional programming and logical programming. That way you can choose your favorite programming paradigm early on in your career and don't get surprised and wonder what would have been if you found it earlier in your career. I hope other countries teach programming like that as well

Re: Becoming Foolish

#28
post #11

Don't learn languages - learn pure paradigms. I can write C# three different ways - imperative procedural, functional, imperative OOP.

I have seen imperative / OOP Python written in the style of Java. It's not great.

Relevant video: Stop Writing Classes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0

Re: Becoming Foolish

#29
post #21
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html see "How are stories ranked?"

Right, when the stories on the front page are older that time factor dilutes their high scores, giving lower-score but newer posts an advantage.

I think it would be interesting to display the derivative of votes with respect to time, or a Wilson score or something. I assume there are good reasons why you don't, but nonetheless it interests me.

Re: Becoming Foolish

#30
post #26

A lovely post. The Haskell-I/O-inspired brainflip is very nicely described. I've never been a Haskell programmer, but a thing that struck me about the Idris book (which is mentioned in one of the comments on that post) is its very calm introduction to monadic I/O in terms of the separation between evaluation and execution - which the author of the book (and developer of Idris) manages without using the word monad, I…

The Idris book is awesome. Also, Liquid Haskell is awesome, if Idris is too painful.
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