Questions • Hacker News Board

Re: Questions

#141

Post by doitLP » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:43 PM UTC

panic wrote: post #8

> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved? > Books are great (unless you're Socrates). We now have magic ink. As an artifact for effecting the transmission of knowledge (rather than a source of entertainment), how can the book be improved? How can we help authors understand how well their work is doing in practice? (Which parts are readers confused by or stumbling over or skipping?) How can…

True. Case in point, (the newly discovered 1300 year old book): http://www.openculture.com/2018/09/europes-oldest-intact-boo...

Re: Questions

#142

Post by petra » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:46 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #106

> Why are programming environments still so primitive? Because we as an industry made a strategic decision in the late 20th century to value run-time efficiency over all other quality metrics, a decision which has manifested itself in the primacy of C and its derivatives. Everything else has been sacrificed in the name of run time efficiency, including, notably, security. Development convenience was also among the co…

One reason(or maybe the common excuse) is often "we need to have full control". That's a reason most managers can get behind.

So that's a common reason slowing every shift to a higher level language or library, to tools that automatically create stuff for you(GUI, optimized code from dsl), to using a platform controlled by another company(one important channel for newer tech, with some strong ux benefits over open-source), to trusting open source.

Re: Questions

#143

Post by _8j50 » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:47 PM UTC

> "Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?"

Incentive. Something costs X dollars because there are sufficient number of customers that are willing to pay X amount. Even if the cost of providing goods or services gets cheaper, businesses will charge more if they can.

Capitalism assumes things will get cheaper as a result of competition, but that does not take into account third party involvement. if the payment is made by a third party,the incentive to compete by lowering prices decreases dramatically. A third party could be a credit card backer,insurance,government subsidies,etc... The impact of reducing the price is either not felt or is delayed significantly. It plays a much smaller role in consumer decision making when a thirdparty is involved.

The problem cascades up and down supply chains,making trivial projects and services cost an insane amount. I blame this for many things including healthcare costs,car repair costs,public infrastructure costs,etc...

Re: Questions

#144

Post by wallace_f » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:47 PM UTC

mvilim wrote: post #130

>> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present? A large contributing factor is that major projects today are much more complicated than they were in the past. The tools we have built are always advancing, but the size of the human brain is not. As projects become more and more complicated, they require a larger number of people to collaborate, and that comes…

Of course there are examples where complexity cannot be the issue. Russia had frankly no legitimate explanation or capacity to out-compete the US on launch systems, yet they did in many ways. Even the US-built Atlas V uses Russian RD-180 engines. Perhaps things like regulatory capture and bureaucratic intertia, among others, are to blame.

There are other examples. I spent a lot of time around Boston, where road work takes ages, the roads are horrendously bad, and the most corrupt large-scale project in history took forever to finish (and then even a ceiling tile fell off and killed someone due to absurdly corrupt quality control). Of course, complex roads projects can be built extroardinarily quickly and safely[1].

1 - https://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/25/california-free...

Re: Questions

#145

Post by rjtobin » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:51 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #106

> Why are programming environments still so primitive? Because we as an industry made a strategic decision in the late 20th century to value run-time efficiency over all other quality metrics, a decision which has manifested itself in the primacy of C and its derivatives. Everything else has been sacrificed in the name of run time efficiency, including, notably, security. Development convenience was also among the co…

> You should try it some time.

Worth noting that Patrick Collison was/is a Lisp user. While in high school, he won a fairly prestigious Irish national science-fair-type contest (the “Young Scientist”) with an AI bot written in some Lisp dialect.

IIRC he also contributed some patches to one of the major Lisp projects.

Re: Questions

#146

Post by tvanantwerp » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:51 PM UTC

mvilim wrote: post #130

>> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present? A large contributing factor is that major projects today are much more complicated than they were in the past. The tools we have built are always advancing, but the size of the human brain is not. As projects become more and more complicated, they require a larger number of people to collaborate, and that comes…

I travel to Hong Kong every few years to visit family. Each time, there are more MTR stations--and on some occasions, entirely new lines. The MTR is just as complex as BART, if not moreso. I think it's worth considering why some places can build things like a metro fast, but others can't.

Re: Questions

#147

Post by sakoht » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:55 PM UTC

"Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?"

Because we are lying about inflation. It's not a conspiracy, just a mutually agreed-to delusion. By pretending inflation is lower than it is, the poor feel like they are standing still instead of sinking ...though instinctively they know. And the people just keeping up get to feel richer. Since technology and efficiency improve, the people staying in the same place have cooler things.

If inflation were reported correctly, average would see their paychecks dropping as wealth and power consolidate elsewhere. There is no interest in creating alarm around this fact. Instead the public is distracted by social drama, and political discourse consumed by things that do not affect the real shift in power.

Re: Questions

#148

Post by rubyfan » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:55 PM UTC

mvilim wrote: post #130

>> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present? A large contributing factor is that major projects today are much more complicated than they were in the past. The tools we have built are always advancing, but the size of the human brain is not. As projects become more and more complicated, they require a larger number of people to collaborate, and that comes…

I thought this was the most interesting question also.

My own experience bias suggests there is a scale problem related to skilled workers. That is to say there are fewer people with skills needed to achieve the work demanded (by the whole system).

There could be a number of factors here but I’d have to assert education and incentives have not kept pace with the demand. I think this holds true even if we say the projects are more complex than ever or if the technology has advanced rapidly. It still seems like an imbalance of skilled workers to the work.

Re: Questions

#149

Post by lisper » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 1:58 PM UTC

rjtobin wrote: post #145

lisper wrote: post #106

> Why are programming environments still so primitive? Because we as an industry made a strategic decision in the late 20th century to value run-time efficiency over all other quality metrics, a decision which has manifested itself in the primacy of C and its derivatives. Everything else has been sacrificed in the name of run time efficiency, including, notably, security. Development convenience was also among the co…

> You should try it some time. Worth noting that Patrick Collison was/is a Lisp user. While in high school, he won a fairly prestigious Irish national science-fair-type contest (the “Young Scientist”) with an AI bot written in some Lisp dialect. IIRC he also contributed some patches to one of the major Lisp projects.

Yes, I know. He was signed up for Google's Summer of Code (I forget the exact year) to do a CL project and I was going to be his mentor. But before it started he quit and founded Stripe instead. :-)

Re: Questions

#150

Post by sakoht » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 2:01 PM UTC

"Why are programming environments still so primitive?"

Try JetBrains tools (IntelliJ,Pycharm and kin). I still use vim to edit from a shell, but the JetBrians suite is higher-order coding.

Editing a function while debugging it was available in VB in the 90s. Drag the execution arrow to code you have already run, rewrite it, and step-over.